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NewsFan - RSS News Feed Reader
NewsFan - RSS News Feed Reader
Heinz Tschabitscher
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NewsFan 1.8.3 - RSS News Feed Reader

From Heinz Tschabitscher,
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Guide Rating - rating

The Bottom Line

NewsFan is a clean and easy to use RSS feed reader that comes with an extra cool tool to ticker hot news. Unfortunately, you can't search across feeds or organize feeds in folders.
Pros
  • NewsFan lets you track keywords and tickers them
  • Fast, clean and easy to use
  • NewsFan supports podcasts and can convert news to mp3s
Cons
  • NewsFan lacks cross-feed search and filters
  • You can't organize feeds in folders with NewsFan
  • NewsFan lacks tools to put news in context

Description

  • NewsFan displays RSS (and Atom) feeds in a three-pane interface.
  • Using "hot news" filters, NewsFan can ticker select news items by keyword.
  • NewsFan also makes it easy to search individual feeds and integrates news/blog search engines.
  • NewsFan can send you to Google translations and converts news to mp3s you can listen to.
  • A list of preset feeds get you started quickly, NewsFan also imports from NetNewsWire and OPML.
  • NewsFan includes fast news search using Yahoo! News, Google News, Daypop and others.
  • You can use choose from a number of style sheets for news descriptions in NewsFan.
  • NewsFan supports Mac OS X 10.2+.

Guide Review - NewsFan 1.8.3 - RSS News Feed Reader

Safe for a few slow (and hot) summer days, news fans can consider themselves lucky. There's always something to cheer to, especially if the news fan is using NewsFan to indulge in their passion.

NewsFan not only provides fast and efficient access to RSS feeds through its three-paned interface, you can also search feeds quickly and even track hot (though not slow) news by keyword and have NewsFan announce specific categories by sound and a nice news ticker. The descriptions are rendered beautifully and you can choose from a number of nice style sheets. NewsFan can restrict access to potentially harmful blogs, though I was not able to test or verify that.

There are also shortcomings, however: NewsFan doesn't allow you to search across feeds or organize them in folders, let alone combine these two features to virtual folders. Integration with meta indices and search engines is also missing, as are filters and news display customization.
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