rss

NetNewsWire is a delightfully simple RSS reader for Mac, iPhone and iPad that syncs over iCloud. What’s an RSS reader? It’s the best way to keep up with your news, read blog posts, get YouTube videos, read webcomics and follow anything online.

NetNewsWire is an app I leave open perpetually on my Mac and open dozens of times a day on my iPhone. Since its relaunch a few years ago, it’s become one of the most important, core apps for my work and relaxation. Best of all, it’s totally free and open-source with no ads or tracking.

We all have our favorite news sites, independent blogs or webcomics. A lot of people keep up with new posts on Twitter — it’s where a lot of Cult of Mac traffic comes from. With a mass exodus of Twitter users after you-know-what happened, there’s a way you can still keep up with your favorite sites. It’s a technology that has powered the web for over twenty years called RSS; let me show you can follow the news without Twitter.

This week we “watch” our to-dos with Things, read the news really, really fast with NetNewsWire, make Keynote-style presentations with Markdown, and more.

Apparently, people love email newsletters. Perhaps it’s because they are clean and free of annoying ads and endless “related” “content.” Or maybe its because everyone secretly still uses their email inbox as a de facto inbox for everything in their online life. If you are one of these newsletter lovers, then you will be super-stoked to hear about Mailbrew, which gathers up the latest posts and news from your favorite time sinks, and converts them into emails.

Fiery Feeds is my favorite RSS reader app on iOS. It strikes the perfect balance between power, good looks, and ease of use. For instance, you can customize the entire look of the app with themes, you can set it to share stories to your chosen apps with a single swipe, and the whole thing is navigated with swipes. Version 2.2 just showed up, and it’s a biggie. Apart from some neat UI changes, Fiery Feeds now has iCloud syncing, and its own built-in Instapaper alternative.

Fiery Feeds is an iOS news-reading app that lets you subscribe to any sites you like, and read all their new stories in one place. It’s way better than relying on Twitter for you news, because important stories never get lost in a sea of doggy GIFs. And the new v2.1 gets a visual overhaul, plus support for using Pinboard as a read-later service. I love it.

Did you ever download an audio file to your iPhone, and then wonder just how you are supposed to listen to it? Maybe you have a few recorded lectures you want to listen to on a plane, or you have some audiobooks you’d like to listen to on the beach. The bad news is a that you can’t add music or any other audio to your Music app library without a Mac or a PC.

Since iOS 11, you’ve been able to download and save audio files in the Files app, but good luck listening to them. It’s like listening to audio in the Finder on your Mac, with no way to save your place, or really control the playback much at all.

But there’s a better way. The Overcast podcast app, which is pretty excellent in general, also lets you upload your own audio files, and then it treats them as regular podcast episodes. We also have a more complex method that takes a bit of setup, but can be used with any podcast app, including Apple’s own. Here’s how to use them.

This week we have apps that will help you to learn everything about your guitar, read up on the latest news, and use the Touch Bar to edit text on your MacBook Pro. But who are we trying to fool with all those? This weekend you’ll all be playing Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition all day long.

Lire is an RSS reader for iOS, and it just added a great update in the form of drag-and-drop. Now you can grab any news story and drag it either to Lire’s own drop-shelf (iPhone and iPad), or to another app (iPad). It really makes great use of iOS 11’s drag-and-drop, but is let down by other apps’ poor implementation for receiving dropped items.

Are you still using RSS? If you are (and you should be, as we’ll see in a moment), then you should use the Feed Hawk app on your iPhone and iPad. Feed Hawk puts itself in your iOS Share Sheet and locates the RSS feed(s) from any website you visit. If you want, it can automatically subscribe you to the RSS feed in your RSS reader of choice.

The latest version of Feed Hawk can even find feeds for YouTube channels. That, in case you’re wondering, is huge.

We love Unread, an RSS reader by developer Jared Sinclair. We’re also big fans of Castro, an exquisitely beautiful podcasting app by Supertop. So we’re delighted to hear that both apps are under the same roof, saving one developer from poverty and frustration while making another developer’s catalog ever stronger.

It has been months since I opened Reeder, my longtime app of choice for RSS. I don’t have anything personal against Reeder, it’s just that RSS has lost a lot of its appeal for me. Twitter is where I mainly get my news now.

Reeder 2 for Mac, which launches as a public beta today, might just make me give RSS a second chance.

Unread is an iPhone alternative to the king of iPad RSS readers, Mr Reader. Not that it works the same way, or looks anything like Mr Reader, or has anything to do with it at all. No, the thing that the new super-minimal, gesture-based Unread has in common with Mr Reader is sharing.

Feedshare is a great new service for sharing your RSS feeds. That is, you can upload the OPML file containing all your subscribed feeds and it will be available to anyone who cares. And you don’t just have to share your entire RSS setup either. You could use this to share a set of feeds on a particular subject for instance.

Mr. Reader, the best RSS news reader app for the iPad, is now fully iOS 7-ready, letting me (finally!) get the last non iOS 7 app out of my dock. As you’d expect, it now looks great, and adds a few neat new features.

Maybe I’m a big dummy, but I always thought that the whole point of “read later” apps was that you could shunt long-form articles off the desktop and onto a device that was better suited for reading for extended periods. After all, on the desktop a combination of bookmarks and Safari’s Reader view takes care of things.

But what do I know? Clearly there’s a place for reader apps on the Mac, and the $10 Words looks to be a very nice example.

RSS isn’t dead yet. Version 2.0 of Reeder, the highly anticipated sequel to the popular RSS app, has launched in the App Store as a universal download for the iPhone and iPad.

We’re living in a post-Google Reader world now, so Reeder 2 features support for some of the most popular paid and free syncing services: Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, Fever, and Readability.

When the paid version of the very fine Feedly RSS aggregation service, Feedly Pro, was announced at the beginning of this month, the only option available was the Life Membership, at a fairly affordable $99.00.

Today, though, we just noticed that Feedly Pro’s monthly and annual subscriptions are available for purchase, at $5.00 and $45.00, respectively.

If you’ve been looking for flexible, comprehensive server monitoring then look no further – this Cult of Mac Deals offer is what you’ve been searching for.

For administrators who need to keep track of multiple sites, servers, and applications, Simon is the tool to do it. With a beautiful and intuitive interface, the app displays everything you’re tracking with key stats on uptime, time until next check, time since last change and failures – and even displays this info with graphs and lists when you drill down.

After you’ve set your test parameters, Simon can notify you via Growl, speech, Twitter, email, and even text message whenever an update is available or a server goes down. Advanced users will enjoy extras like session capturing and multipage reports, but even less experienced users can quickly get up to speed with this flexible, reliable utility.

And you can get the “bronze edition” of Simon right now for the low price of only $25 courtesy of Cult of Mac Deals.

Hey RSS refugees (RSS-u-gees?). Did you sign up for a Feed Wrangler account so you could import all your Google Reader feeds and keep using them in something like the Excellent Mr. Reader app? Me too. And did you see that Feed Wrangler pretty much just ignored all your carefully thought-out and painstakingly organized folders, instead dumping all your feeds into one big list? So you thought “Screw this” and used the free Feedly instead?

Me too.

But Feed Wrangler has now tweaked its import engine so all your folders will be converted into Smart Feeds. Better still, you just need to re-import your exported Google Reader OPML file and it’ll fix everything up for you.

July 1st has come and gone, and Google Reader is dead. The beloved RSS aggregator has been an invaluable tool for legions of news junkies throughout the years, but it wasn’t popular enough for Google to keep it running.

You can look at Google Reader’s death two ways: as either a misfortune, or an opportunity.

In the wake of Reader’s demise, numerous RSS platforms have sprung up, and many of them have built upon what made Reader great. Enter Feedly.

The developer behind Reeder, one of the best Google Reader clients for iOS, has confirmed that the app’s development will continue after Google Reader is closed on July 1. The app will soon receive an update which will bring support for a number of Google Reader alternatives, and if that wasn’t enough, it’ll be free on the iPhone starting today.

Mr. Reader, my favorite RSS reader for the iPad, has added support for a slew of third party sync services. Thus this new 2.0 version places the app at the head of the line when it comes to rescuing you from the impending Google Reader shutdown.

Digg Reader, the service hoping to secure as many Google Reader users as it can when the service closes on July 1, has just begun rolling out in beta to early testers. The news comes just as the official Digg Reader app for iOS is expected to hit the App Store.

NetNewsWire is the granddaddy of RSS readers, and v4.0 is now ready for you in beta form. It still doesn’t really sync, but it brings the arrow-based navigation from the previous incarnations of NNW that might make it the fastest news reader on your Mac.