Recommend me a new feed reader

[kpreid]

I’m currently using an old version of NetNewsWire Lite; I stopped upgrading when the NewsGator thing happened, because I didn’t want a third-party service involved. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support Atom 1.0, has some UI glitches, and doesn't provide any nice way to notice when a feed is dead.

Requirements:

• Must support fully offline operation (and therefore must run entirely on my Mac).
  • Use case: I have no internet access and I want something to read.
  • Downloading embedded images is optional.
• Must be able to handle 500 feeds (mostly low-volume) and 2000 unread items (when I’m too busy to read for a while).
• Must support per-item read/unread states for “must not miss anything” feeds and “mark unread for later”-style use.
• Must support efficient scanning (e.g. spacebar for scroll down/next item, and not slow to respond). (This is another reason it needs to run locally; network/server latency for UI interaction is unacceptable.)
• Must support HTTP authentication with stored passwords for feeds.
• Per-feed (or per-feed-group) customizable polling frequency.

Nice things:

• Has an offline mode — ability to inhibit or stop downloading of feeds.
• Does not use a third-party server (no mandatory accounts or syncing).
• Remember unread items even if they have “scrolled off” the feed, for last-N-items feeds which generate more than N items more often than I read them.
• Does better than my current setup for handling the distinction between “must not miss anything” and “as time permits, feel free to skip” feeds.
• Has support for scraping and/or plain “has this site changed?” for sites without feeds. (There are web services to do this, which I am using occasionally; I'm talking about built-in functionality.)

(This list was written in a hurry; I may revise it as I think of additional requirements.)

Comments

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Honestly, when I wanted this, I went with Google Reader + Google Gears.
* Offline reading support
* Seems to handle large numbers of feeds well (I only have 100, but the UI seems flexible enough that I'm not worried about it)
* Supports many unread items with ease (back 30 days)
* Supports mark unread for now, for later
* Efficient scanning -- the UI pre-loads many results and it's very quick to 'catch up' on a large st of items
* I'm not sure on the HTTP auth, so this might actually be a dealbreaker. I haven't needed it.
* It's not clear to me why you need customizable polling frequency; this is all behind the scenes, and seems to work 'well enough' for me. (Items I care about are always available within minutes of becoming available in the feed.)

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

I didn't know Google Reader had an offline option; thanks for the info.

The customizable polling frequency is because I don't want to flood low-volume sites with polling, but still get prompt updates from high-volume sites. Google Reader is in a better position - since it's a centralized service, they can (and do) fetch any given feed only once for all of their users, so there's no cumulative load.

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Yep, Google Reader having offline behavior was actually one of the first apps to do so, because RSS is so well-suited to the gears method of storing data offline, I expect. (Not a lot of random access, very obvious things to keep vs. not keep, etc.) I've used it to great effect while travelling and so on.

[(Anonymous)]

Umm - NetNewsWire is now free and syncs using Google Reader rather than NewsGator. Pretty sure it meets all your requirements as well as Google Reader + Google Gears does...

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

Does it have the option to not sync with any service?

[(Anonymous)]

yes.