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I've been using NetNewsWire for quite some time, but it's grown a bit long in the tooth. And now there is some weird bug where things are appearing out of order on the desktop. So I'm looking to switch. Please only suggest things that meet all of this criteria -

  1. An OS X desktop client that has a badge notification in the dock icon so that I know when there are new stories.
  2. Syncs up with an iPhone app (push notifications are a bonus but i'm guessing there is nothing like that out there yet)
  3. Displays as much as it can in the reader (YouTube embeds, for example, would be a huge plus) so that I don't have to visit the website
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2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Google Reader is your best bet. Bear with me, this is the setup I'm using for Mac, Web, and iPhone access and it works really well.

  1. Download Fluid.app.
  2. Save this PNG image to your Desktop.
  3. Open Fluid.app and use the Google Reader URL, name, and newly-saved icon.
  4. Launch the Google Reader application from your Applications folder.
  5. Buy Byline or use the really good mobile version of Google Reader (you can save it to your Home screen to boot).

To address your individual requirements, Fluid.app somehow displays unread Google Reader item counts as a badge icon. It sure surprised me! Second, sync is automatic since the Web application is acting as the data store. I was a NNW user until I decided to give Byline a shot and it syncs with every item read, which is so much better than NNW. Finally, Fluid.app basically wraps WebKit into an application so it can do anything Safari can.

It seems a little unorthodox, but it has enabled me to tame my 260 feeds whereas the NNW/NG combination never did. (May I also heartily recommend mastering the keyboard shortcuts of the Google Reader Web application? It is very much worthwhile. Pressing "?" while in the Web application will bring up a reference sheet--ESC to close.)

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Oh and the saving of the PNG in step 2 is to make the Dock icon/CMD-TAB icon look halfway decent. Fluid.app will use the favicon otherwise and that's looks HORRIBLETERRIBLE. – bbrown Jul 17 '09 at 23:55
Byline is very much worth the $4.99 price tag, incidentally. You'll make it up in no time with the feed reading productivity. – bbrown Jul 17 '09 at 23:56
@bbrown "feed-reading productivity" — isn't that an oxymoron? :P – jtbandes Jul 17 '09 at 23:59
If you're a professional paid feed reader, then speeding up your feed reading ability is productive. I'm not, by the way, so I like to think of "productivity" in feed reading as wasting less time. – bbrown Jul 18 '09 at 0:34
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Here's a better Google Reader icon: flickr.com/photos/muzo178/2211154209/sizes/o/in/… – bbrown Jul 18 '09 at 0:49
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up vote 3 down vote

I use Vienna and love it. I don't know if it does iPhone syncing (I don't have an iPhone) but it uses the Safari rendering engine (from what I can gather) so it supports flash video in the reader pane. You can also open posts in itself as new tabs which improve the reading experience (as it loads it like a web page) and you can open directly to Safari from the UI.

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+1: Vienna rocks. – Stefano Borini Jul 17 '09 at 23:27

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