My journey to Vienna

A lot of people are upset that the upcoming version of NetNewsWire will have an ad at the bottom of the sidebar, prompting some to make the switch to the open source news reader Vienna.

We won’t debate the merits of ads or no ads in an app here, but if you’re thinking of making the switch, you should know what you’re getting into. I’ve been using Vienna for a week to see if I would be happy with it. I’ve come to a conclusion, but first let’s look at the the details.

The first thing you should do is export your current feeds from NetNewsWire. Click on File -> Export Subscriptions . . . From there, you’ll be prompted to name the file and save it. You can just go with the default name and save it to some place handy such as the desktop.

Next, fire up Vienna and click on File -> Import Subscriptions . . . You’ll be prompted to navigate to the file you created with NetNewsWire. Go to it and click OK. The sidebar in Vienna will automatically be populated with all your subscriptions in the same order you had with NetNewsWire.

The tricky part is that if you had your feeds divided into various folders, you’ll have to create them yourself in Vienna and divvie up the feeds manually. This can be slightly confusing because Vienna refers to these folders as Group Folders and to the individual feeds as Folders. NetNewsWire uses the terms Folders and Sources, which makes more sense.

Once you’ve got everything set up, you’ll find that the interface you’re working with is quite similar to NetNewsWire — not to mention many other Mac apps that use the sidebar metaphor. The tool bar at the top of Vienna allows you do many of the same things as you could with NetNewsWire, but access is not always as handy. For example, sometimes you have to click on a Gear icon to get to the functions you want. In my case, I would have liked to have easier access to Mark All Articles As Read — although I did find Vienna’s Skip Folder to be an acceptable substitute.

With either program, you can, of course, double-click on a story and have it open in the originating website. I like the way Vienna’s tabs expand to show all or most of the title of the article using a spiffy animation. NetNewsWire truncates them all to the same length.

Once in a while, if I’m reading an article, I like to drag its bookmark onto the desktop so I can refer back to it later. With NetNewsWire (or Safari for that matter), you can grab onto the favicon and drag it to create a bookmark file. Strangely, this is not possible with Vienna. Of course, I could simply flag the item, and I can see myself getting used to doing things this way.

The big difference between the two programs is syncing. Simply put, you can do it with NetNewsWire and you can’t do it with Vienna. For many people, syncing is a great way to read the news from various devices, keeping everything in order. This isn’t an issue for me, so I didn’t miss it. But if you need syncing, this will be a deal breaker.

All in all, I have to say say my experience with Vienna has been positive. The few criticisms I have seem like nit-picks more than anything else.

If you want a good, free news reader sans ads, and you can live without syncing, Vienna is the way to go.

date posted Posted Friday, August 7, 2009 in

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  1. I’ve been a user for 2 years, and love it.

    You comment, “In my case, I would have liked to have easier access to Mark All Articles As Read — although I did find Vienna’s Skip Folder to be an acceptable substitute.”

    Simple, just right-click your mouse, and choose “Mark all articles as read”. Piece of cake! Can’t get much easier than that.

    mike

  2. It’s good to know that a contextual menu option is available — although, as with the gear button, you still have to click twice — first to pop the menu and second to select the function. In any case, it was a minor quibble.

    Mark

  3. I just discovered a better solution for Mark All Articles As Read — press the letter “k” on the keyboard.

    Mark

  4. I’ve just switched to Vienna, too. In my case primarily because I paid for NNW within a month of it going ‘free’ and I’m still a little annoyed (Get over it… I know, I know) but primarily because I dislike advertising, don’t wish to pay twice and really don’t want to sync through Google.

    Anyway The Typical Mac User Podcast had a suggestion on a work around for using Dropbox and symlinks to sync two Macs. I set it up for three and it works pretty well. Not perfectly unless the Macs are on at the same time but generally you only have a few read items presented as unread when you launch a laptop after using a desktop, for example.

    http://typicalmacuser.com/wordpress/2009/08/02/an-alternative-to-netnewswire-vienna/

    Also in my semi-focussed research, I read that Syncing is on the Vienna wish list for future development. It looks promising. Thanks Mark for the ‘k’ tip! That’s great.

    Welles





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