NetNewsWire

The planet's best RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire, just got a ton better. I was leery when Brett announced that his little program that could had been bought by online aggregator NewsGator. I assumed that heralded the end of development. I am happy to be proven wrong. The new beta 2.1 adds a remarkably sophisticated synchronization mode with the web-based NewsGator system. Now, no matter where you read your feeds, each viewer knows what you've read, so you don't waste time cutting through a thicket of repeats when you switch machines. Because I regularly rotate among 3 machines in a day, this is fantastic for me.

I haven't explored all of the boundaries of the synchronization yet. It looks like adding or removing a feed in one place is automatically reflected it to all others. But can the home client download unread messages collected at the always-on webserver, even if they've already gone stale from the feed? That would make a convenient way to keep up with ALL of the news for the day, not just the stuff that's still being fed when I get home.