I fully expected to have to drop Safari as my primary RSS reader, and revert to NetNewsWire 2.0. I assumed that the lack of all of the wonderful features would cripple me in my quest to satisfy my RSS addiction. I thought I'd be frustrated and annoyed with Safari's RSS implementation.
I'm not. I found that the only time I launch NetNewsWire now is for a daily update of podcast downloads (Safari RSS doesn't do enclosures). But, I read all of my feeds and posts in Safari. For a bit of background - in NNW, I stick to the "New Posts" folder more than 99% of the time, and just cycle through posts as they come in - so the One True Page listing in Safari is just fine for my style.
The biggest thing I assumed I'd miss is the "Flagged" toggle on posts in NNW. However, posts that I flag almost always get tossed onto my del.icio.us account anyway, so that's really not a big loss. And now I'm forced to "flag" things in such a way that I can access them from anywhere, rather than having the flag buried in my NNW database on my Powerbook.
I have Safari set to check all of my 390-ish feeds, but have separated my Flickr feeds out of the "main" folder of feeds so that I can check it separately (say, once a day, rather than with every update). I also have Safari set to prioritize New Posts, show recent articles from the last 7 days (so I don't miss a couple of posts say from late last night - a "New Posts" item under Recent Articles would be perfect). I also have "Article Length" set to be just the titles and the first couple of lines of a post - so I can scan pretty quickly through all new posts.
There are a few tweaks I'd like to see in Safari's RSS implementation:
- the "New Posts" item in "Recent Articles"
- enclosures support
- a way to mark all feeds as "Read" so I don't have to load 1000 items if I haven't viewed in a day or so
- showing some status on feed updating
- The search field not grabbing the cursor automatically, so I have to click in the main window before I can hit SPACE to start paging down. Frigging annoying!
Other than that, it's surprisingly solid.
Here's a screenshot of my Safari RSS setup (click the image for a full view)
Compare with a current view of NNW as I use it (click image for a full view)
