Reading News

Previously, I've been a Google Reader fan for my RSS news reading needs. Now that I'm a proper Apple fan boi with an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, I've switched to NetNewsWire. Waaay better. The Google Reader iPhone app was what really drove me away. I'm probably going to have to turn off my blog for this, but desktop applications are frequently better than web applications. Heresy, I know. Google's iPhone Reader app has two specific problems:

1. It refreshes the page after you close a tab. This is pretty irritating. Particularly if, like me, you only show unread items. Things disappear while I'm still reading them. Aargh!

2. The big one: they 'mobilize' web pages. That is, instead of linking to the original version of every item Google has decided to link to a rewritten version of the item. Supposedly this version will be more readable on the iPhone. Well, the iPhone actually has a really good browser. But they've actually significantly broken something: the iPhone web browser recognises YouTube URLs and opens them in the built-in YouTube app. Because the iPhone web browser can't play YouTube movies. The rewriting means that this doesn't work. Thank you Google, thank you.

Anyway, there is one feature that I miss from Google Reader: sharing items. But there's the whole desktop application thing going on. I'm now posting items I would have shared to my Twitter feed: gga, look for items tagged #feed.

So how do I this? A pretty simple piece of AppleScript:

tell application "NetNewsWire"
        set t to title of selectedHeadline
        set u to URL of selectedHeadline
end tell
tell application "Twitterrific"
        post update t & ": " & u & " (#feed)"
end tell

A single click from NetNewsWire and I've posted an item to Twitter. If you think you might be interested in items I've previously shared, follow me on Twitter.