Simply an outstanding RSS reader — far more flexible than NewsBar

RSS Reader Plus is simply an outstanding reader. I tried it against what seems to be its main competitor, NewsBar, and found RSS Reader Plus to be superior in almost every way: not only more flexible, and far more powerful; but also easier to use.

Contrary to what another reviewer said (user Armik, at Aug 24, 2013), this app DOES allow you to group feeds — and, even better, in multiple ways. You can create a normal, group folder, in which you can put whatever feeds you want (all your Art & Design feeds in one, Tech & Gadget feeds in another, etc.) But you can also create as many SMART folders as you want, each using as many search criteria as you want to define. This blows NewsBar’s basic “Show me posts that match my single list of keywords” view out of the water.

The single, unified window is a pleasure, especially since you can select whether the app will show posts in a simplified, stripped view, or render them in their HTML entirety as full web pages, complete with all sidebars and clickable links, from directly within the app itself. (It uses its own native browswer for this.) I.e., no more need to jump back and forth between the RSS reader and whatever normal browser you use. (Though of course, you CAN customize it to open posts in your system’s native browser too — and there’s even a separate keyboard shortcut for that.)

Which brings me to keyboard shortcuts: there’s a TON of them. Again, blows NewsBar out of the water in that regard.

One feature which I particularly like is the easy “Delete” option. This app is modeled as closely as possible on the Mac Mail app in its layout. So, like an email client, it allows you to “trash” posts at the click of a button (or keystroke) — which moves the post from the ‘inbox’ to the ‘trash’ folder. This allows more flexibility in how you treat stuff you’ve read. If you’ve skimmed a post, or read it but want to keep it hand for later, great: mark it as unread. It will then be unbolded, but remain in the inbox for that feed. Once you’ve decided you’re really done with it, then you can ‘delete’ it, which will move it to the trash folder, and get it out of sight. This is FAR more flexible than what Feedly or NewsBar offer. Sure, NewsBar allows you to “Delete” a post (though it’s a pain: there’s no button for it, and no keyboard shortcut: you have to right-click on the headline, and choose delete, which is seriously clunky). But once you do that in NewsBar, the post is gone baby: there’s no way to view the posts you’ve previously trashed, because there’s no trash folder or trash box in NewsBar. RSS Reader Plus makes it a snap. Just click on the “Trash” box, and it’ll display all the messages youve dumped. Decide you wanna ‘undelete’ a message? Easy: just drag-and-drop it back to the ‘mailbox’ for its feed. Or hit the keyboard shortcut.

Crikey, this app is good.

Oh, and of course, it handles OPML files with total ease. So you can import EVERYTHING from your Feedly account (or your NewsBar app, or whatever other RSS reader you’re ditching — as you should — for this one) into RSS Reader Plus in seconds. Can export your stuff just as easily too — to Feedly or whatever — if you wanna use Feedly as an online backup.

Love this thing.

Typhon2222 about RSS Reader Plus