Newzie: not your mama's RSS reader

My continuing plight with RSS readers has spread to my Windows machine, although I think I've found a pretty cool solution: Newzie. There are a number of unique and cool features that make this RSS reader stand out from an overcrowded and underwhelming crowd. How does color-coding sound?

If a news item is about an hour old, it's red. If the news is a stale year ago, it's blue. How very homeland security of them. In NetNewsWire I like to keep my feeds stacked in order of newness, but the color coding is pretty sweet (though a little tough on the eyes after a while). Of course there's the requisite features like tabbed browsing within the app, support for Atom and RSS, content filtering, and you can grab video and audio content. You can also grab pieces and parts of web sites for research or later viewing (web clippings).

Read on for even more goodness...

Another time saver: slide shows. It's a quick way to get through that ton of unread stuff by just looking at the latest unread in, well, a slide show. Set up a few criteria, like how long ago you want to see the unread, and sit back and enjoy. Using left and right arrows you peruse the news. There's even a handy highlighter.

Besides the reading features there are a couple of ways to alert yourself to news. There's a taskbar notifier, which should be a standard option on any RSS reader (even OSX). And there's a DeskBar mode, which squeezes your feeds into a little scrolling bar on the top of your screen. You see the news scrolling by, along with a search bar.

Speaking of search, there's a great web search tool built in that'll search most major engines all at once. By using a shorthand you can specify a search engine, or even do a specific search, like "yi" for a Yahoo image search. That's a time saver for sure.

All this is free, and only on Windows. Who says Windows apps are uninspired?

Tags: freeware