A couple of months ago it was announced that NetNewsWire was now free for individuals. I saw this news in a few places and read some high praise for it in those and other places. Having been fed up with the assorted problems Bloglines has been having for quite a while now, I decided to try NetNewsWire.
NetNewsWire seemed to fit my requirements quite well. I do not necessarily need a desktop client reader but neither am I averse to one as I have a laptop which goes lots of places with me. Also, NetNewsWire syncs with NewsGator, which is their web-based reader.
The export of my OPML file from Bloglines and import into NetNewsWire went flawlessly. I took a couple of days playing with NetNewsWire to decide if I liked it at all. Seeing as I did I turned on the syncing capability and logged into NewsGator and tested it. NewsGator is not what I would prefer for my standard reader but it seemed sufficient for those times when I would be checking my feeds from somewhere other than my laptop.
I was pretty much pleased with this setup and thus logged into Bloglines a few times just to clear the unread posts that were adding up. I still have around 5000 posts marked unread in Bloglines that either need weeded or posted to del.icio.us so I didn’t want to just dump it.
Of course, after two or so weeks of using NetNewsWire I had somewhere between 100-200 posts being kept alive until I decided what to do with them [I know, I know. I need to change my work habits!].
And then it happened.
NetNewsWire began crashing upon launch. Every. Time. It simply will not load. I’ve searched the support forums and have even re-installed it a few times and it simply will not load.
Thus, I’m now relying on NewsGator as my primary feed reader and that is simply not acceptable. It seems to be heavily AJAX-based (or something similar) and is, thus, slow. Once you click a post to mark it read you have to wait to do anything else. This is a several second wait. There are other reasons why it is unaccaptable as a primary feed reader but, for me, that is the main one.
So for several weeks now I have been struggling to engage in any successful manner with the blogosphere. I am, of course, keeping up with the blogs of people who are really important to me for assorted reasons (mostly friends) but I am only haphazardly able to keep up with my normal feed load.
To say the least I am extremely unhappy! On top of all the other uncertainty in my life this does not help.
After only a few days of using NetNewsWire I was looking forward to writing a post that said I had successfully found an alternative to the frustration of using Bloglines. Now I simply wish I had never changed.
I haven’t logged into Bloglines in a couple weeks now to clear out new unread stuff and I am scared to do so. Also, any posts I had marked to keep in NetNewsWire are unavailable to me. Thus, I’ve lost a couple weeks of engagement with friends and others where I have left a comment or something that I meant to get back to when I had time.
If anyone knows how to solve this problem of NetNewsWire’s crashing please pass along any help you can. If anyone has any suggestions for other feed readers I might try (on a Mac) because you use them and like them, please pass those along, too.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Dorothea Salo // Mar 4, 2008 at 11:55 am
NewsFire just went free. I have switched to it from Vienna.
The one irritation I’m finding with ALL desktop readers is their inability to keep items from the same feed together (which Bloglines does by default). I still use Bloglines for my work feeds.
2 Peter Murray // Mar 4, 2008 at 9:26 pm
I use NetNewsWire and haven’t had a similar problem. One of the standard things to try with Mac applications is to delete the application’s preference file (located at “~/Library/Preferences/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist”). This shouldn’t delete your feed subscriptions, and will hopefully resolve your underlying problem.
Good luck!
3 Keith Franklin // Mar 5, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Try clearing your NetNewsWire cache. It sounds like you have some corrupt data in there which is preventing NNW from launching.
Here’s how:
1. Close NetNewsWire
2. In the finder navigate here: ~/Library/Caches/NetNewsWire
3. Delete everything in that folder
4. Launch NetNewsWire
Keith Franklin
NewsGator Support
4 Mark // Mar 5, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Peter, thanks for the tip. I found that one in the forums 2 weeks or so back but it did not do the trick. It was also the 1st thing I tried.
Keith, thanks ever so much for popping in here. Unfortunately, that did not do the trick either. I then tried deleting both sets. Nope. Delete both, uninstall, empty garbage, reinstall. Crash. Sigh.
5 Anna // Mar 17, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Doesn’t help y0u now, I know, but have you tried Google Reader? I find it to be easier to navigate than Bloglines, and I was a loyal Bloglines user for years.
6 Mark // Mar 20, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Oops, I saw your comment and then lost track of it, Anna. Sorry.
Not yet. Although I use Google frequently, I have no Google accounts of any kind. I was seriously considering switching email to Gmail (as I still have to email moved off the PC) for a while but I may be against that move again. So I need to find solutions to a couple of things still.
7 Brent Simmons // Mar 31, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Mark — would you email me a copy of your crash logs? This would let me know what’s going on. (It ought to be fixable, after all.) Thanks!
8 Keith Franklin // Apr 4, 2008 at 11:01 am
Please include (Case 129427) in the subject line when submitting your crash reports. email support at newsgator dot com