I noticed today that a good chunk of our visitors are getting our posts via the feed, so I thought it might be a good time to talk about Vienna. We’ve talked about other RSS readers, and most of the good ones you have to pay for… which sucks. So, here comes Vienna, and…you guessed it! It’s free!
The peeps over at Vienna have 8 major talking points that they believe separates them from the pack of other RSS/Atom readers out there today. I’d have to agree with them on this one, but I’m a little bias… I prefer free alternatives, to the pay for versions. It’s not that I am against paying for an excellent application, like SuperDuper!, but I get a little more pissed off when I pay for an application and they turn around and screw you by not putting out an update for leopard. Free stuff is a little easier to accept, when they take longer to develop. Anyway, I digress…
So Vienna‘s main features that made me make the switch to their software are based on three of their major talking points:
- Smart Folders: The work like every other application that has smart folders on a mac, but here’s how they describe it, “Create folders whose contents are dynamically determined by criteria that you specify. When you view the folder, Vienna automatically displays all articles meeting that criteria.”
- Simple, uncluttered UI: I really hate applications that bombard you with so many extra features that you forget what the app was originally intended for. Vienna strips away all the useless types of features that no one really uses…they keep it simple, and that works for me.
- Blogging Integration: It’s a must today, and Vienna comes through marvelously here. “Quickly blog the selected article. Vienna automatically recognizes the most common blogging software and launches the software with the details of the selected article pre-filled.”
Vienna is an amazing RSS reader, and the fact that it is free, really helps us broke college types where it matters most–our wallets. Great work guys! You set the bar a little higher for the other freeware applications around the interwebz.
