NetNewsWire
It seems my misgivings about NetNewsWire are now redundant. I’m not going to use a system that stores plaintext passwords and payment details but I don’t have the any qualms about using a free service or app with a big-ass security hole in it.
I’ve shifted back from Vienna to NetNewsWire and I’m much happier for it. Vienna is a great product but I really missed NetNewsWire’s ability to sync feeds with the online reader and my mobile via Newsgator. There’s just one slight hack that’s needed to make it a bit better…
In synch-mode NetNewsWire doesn’t fetch feeds from each source: it reads Newsgator’s cached copy. This is generally a good thing; bandwidth costs are kept down for the authors and feed state is maintained between my devices. However, there are some feeds that lose value when they’re stale: server status logs and gone-in-a-minutes deals to name two.
So, how to get the best of both world: 99% of my feeds reading from Newsgator and 1% coming in fresh? NetNewsWire to the rescue!
NetNewsWire doesn’t just consume regular feeds: it can read “feed-like” output from local Apple or Shell scripts. That’s what we’ll use here to bypass Newsgator’s cache; although calling the one-liner a script is a bit of an overstatement.
#!/bin/sh
#Saved in ~/bin/getfeed.sh
#Point a NetNewsWire "Special Subscription" at this script
#and pass the feed's URL as the first argument.
curl $1