threevue

RSS feeds are web feeds for frequently updated works (blogs) which can be consolidated into one program for easy access. They can then be viewed online (via readers like Google Reader), on a standalone program, and even on an iPhone. Basically, I use them to view lots of blogs without having to go to a million sites every day. I’ve been using RSS readers for years now – first with Apple Mail’s built-in RSS reader, and then NetNewsWire until this past week, when I buried the RSS apps of old and jumped into new territory.

Gruml:
It’s no secret that the best online RSS reader is Google Reader – their interface is smooth and easy to use. The only online reader that was almost comparable was NewsGator, which synced with standalone app NetNewsWire (which has a PC counterpart, FeedDemon, but I’ve never tried it) until they gave up and started syncing it with Google Reader. Problem is, NetNewsWire doesn’t work as well with Google Reader as it did with NewsGator. This made me start looking for a replacement program, and I settled upon Gruml.

Gruml (pictured above) syncs perfectly with Google Reader and has a few great features, too, like being able to send articles directly to your Twitter, complete with shortened URLs. It also shows your unread count in the menu bar (nice touch). It’s currently in beta so it’ll only get better in the future. Totally free.

Byline:
I’ve been using the NetNewsWire iPhone app since its initial release in August of ’08, but I’ve never been that happy with it. It’s slow, clunky, and it just had a new update that actually made it less user-friendly. This “upgrade” drove me to look for other RSS iPhone apps, and I am currently loving the $4 app Byline, which runs amazingly fast, and is customizable well beyond any RSS app I’ve used. It even caches your feeds for offline viewing, should you be stuck somewhere without a signal (subway, doctor’s office, etc).

So there you have it. For $4 I can wrangle all my nerdy Google Reader feeds in three different ways.