Best Mac Tools: Five Indispensable Apps NetNewsWire, Adium, and Cocoalicious Michael Hall
NetNewsWire
NewsGator Technologies, Inc. Price: $29.95 for the full version, NetNewsWire Lite is free of charge NetNewsWire Website
What it does: NetNewsWire is an RSS reader that's able to sync your subscriptions between multiple computers.
There are several RSS readers for Mac OS X. Safari comes with one built in, for instance, and there are other commercial and free offerings. NetNewsWire consistently sets the standard, though. Here are some reasons I love it:
As I mentioned, it can sync all your subscriptions between computers using one of three methods: A free NewsGator subscription, a .Mac account, or an FTP/SFTP server. The NewsGator method is the fastest and most transparent.
In each case, though, if you're reading your daily list of feeds and shut down to go to work, or home, when you start NetNewsWire up at another location, everything is marked read or unread just as you left it at the previous machine. Its syncing isn't perfect, but it's usually pretty good.
NetNewsWire has a built-in tabbed browser. That's not such a big deal on a more powerful machine, where opening links in a regular browser like Safari or Firefox is no big deal. On an older or less powerful machine, it's quite handy to open Web pages in the same app where you're reading feeds just because it's one less piece of software to such up precious memory and processor time.
It has built-in social bookmarking and blogging tools. If you see something you want to share, click a button and NetNewsWire will open up a social bookmarking or blogging utility and create a new entry for you to edit and save.
It has Smart Lists and tag subscriptions. If you keep track of a hundred or more feeds, it's pretty useful to create Smart Lists that weed them down to something manageable. Want a list of every RSS item with the word "klingon" in it? That's what a Smart List is for. Tag subscriptions let you get a customized feed from sites like Technorati or del.icio.us that only shows entries from blogs or bookmarks with a given tag.
Adium
The Adium Project Price: Free Software (available under the GPL license) Adium Website
What it does: Adium is a chat client for multiple IM networks.
iChat is nice, but it has some limitations. You can use it for AIM and Jabber/Gtalk, but you only get one account for each protocol. Adium provides access to a number of IM networks:
You can have multiple accounts on each, too. So if you've got two AIM accounts — one for work and one for personal use — Adium can connect you to both at the same time.
Adium is very customizable and offers tabbed chat, so you can have multiple IM conversations in a single window.
If you like iChat, by the way, and don't need everything Adium offers but would like tabbed chat, consider Chax. It does a lot to make iChat more livable, and it's free. If I used iChat, Chax would be on this list.
Cocoalicious
Sci-Fi Hi-Fi/Buzz Andersen Price: Free (and open source under the BSD license) Cocoalicious Website
What it does: Cocoalicious is a social bookmarking tool that's primarily compatible with del.icio.us, but can also talk to services that offer APIs similar to del.icio.us, such as ma.gnolia
Social bookmarking sites are where I remember everything I want to get back to. I store column ideas, recipes, howtos, items I want to put in my blog's periodic link list and more on ma.gnolia where I can get at them from any computer.
Cocoalicious provides a way to post bookmarks and retrieve them later using any site compatible with the del.icio.us API. Since it's a local program, it just pops up and gets out of the way, letting me get on with my browsing, without waiting for a bookmark page to load. It also lets me search all my bookmarks and preview the pages I marked without loading them into my browser. Finally, because it offers Applescript support, I can use it to gather all the day's links into a tidy list for posting on my blog.
And that's my list. I use plenty of other software, but these five apps are key to how I use the Internet daily. I'm always on the lookout for something better, though, and love to hear about things I've missed. Feel free to write and maybe we can get enough suggestions to put together a list of reader favorites.
