NewsLife 1.2 - RSS News Feed Reader

NewsLife provides a sane and simple way to read news and articles coming via RSS feeds.
Smart folders could still be a helpful addition, and better keyboard navigation would be nice.

Simple beats complicated any time — any time simple lets you do what you want.

If you want to follow a few — maybe not too many — blogs and sites using their RSS feeds, NewsLife lets you do that with said simplicity, speed and sanity.

Instead of nesting folders and labels and filters, NewsLife has a list of feeds and a few "Quick Views": you can view all a feed's items, all unread articles or everything published on a certain day.

Of course, NewsLife lets you search for articles easily, as well. You cannot save these searches as smart folders, though, or use criteria to limit search results. NewsLife's handy "News Bin" holds articles you've dragged there for later reference, to blog them in one go or socially bookmark their links.

To keep things simple, NewsLife expires old articles after a predefined time, say after a month. You can tweak the default setting for each feed, and tell NewsLife how often to check for new items as well.

NewsLife handles enclosures such as podcasts gracefully, can alert you about newly arrived headlines (not via Growl, though), integrates with blog editors and social bookmarking sites, and generally does the most useful thing without too many options, tweaks or clicks.

Speaking of clicks: while NewsLife does include a nice handful of keyboard shortcuts, basic navigation through feeds and articles using the keyboard alone is almost impossible.