By Jimmy Piraino

Ever get tired of going to your favorite blogs and news sites only to be bombarded by pop-up ads and useless blinking banners? Well Mac, iPad, and iPhone users now have a way to enjoy their favorite news stories without the advertisements, using the simple app NetNewsWire by NewsGator Technologies.

NetNewsWire, described by Dan Frakes from Macworld.com as “A stellar example of a newsreader done right,” is a simple application with a smooth interface that brings you your favorite blogs and news using Really Simple Syndication.

Really Simple Syndication, more commonly known as an RSS feed, is a blog format that gives a bare-bones display of a website, keeping the news and blog posts while shaving off the ads. NetNewsWire takes these RSS feeds and combines them into one simple-to-use interface, so whether a user looks at one blog a day, or 50, they won’t miss a single story.

There are several features of NetNewsWire that help the app stand above the rest in the RSS reader market. First, and most importantly, the app is free for the Mac and iPhone. Both are supported by ads, which are shown in the bottom left corner of the app. NetNewsWire also links with a user’s Google Reader account, which allows users to sync their RSS feeds between different accounts and systems.

For those more socially inclined, NetNewsWire is able to connect to Twitter accounts for easy sharing of a user’s favorite stories and blog posts with friends. NetNewsWire also has a full-functioning web browser built into the app. This feature helps minimize the wait time when opening a link from a news story, or when loading the source from within the app.

My favorite feature of NetNewsWire is also one of the most simple and overlooked. Just like Google Gmail, a user can “star” their favorite stories in NetNewsWire to save for a later read date. This feature becomes increasingly useful with each new RSS feed a user subscribes to. Finding a great story is easy, but remembering where it is hours later can be, and usually is, a complete chore. Marking a story as a favorite gives the user easy access to it at a later time, without the hassle of scrolling through potentially thousands of recent news stories.

Pricing for the premium ad-free version of NetNewsWire for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone varies slightly for each platform. For both the Mac and iPad premium versions, the price is $14.99. However, the iPhone version costs only $4.99. So if the small ads become too much of an annoyance, there is a way out.

NetNewsWire can be accessed and downloaded online at www.NetNewsWireapp.com.

Sources:

http://www.macworld.com/reviews/product/413104/review/netnewswire_317.html (Dan Frakes quote)

http://netnewswireapp.com/ (information and pricing)