I’m not switching from NetNewsWire, but always curious to see what others are coming up with. Here’s one I came across via Macintouch: NewsFan. This program appears to be developed in Japan, per the address at the bottom of the home page, and there are just enough oddities in the English language descriptions to underline that a non-native English speaker wrote the words.
FUN – EASE – SPEED – USEFUL
Now the browser feature integrated!
Of course, I know nothing of Japanese, so I’m not throwing stones here, just noting that making yourself understood in another language and being idiomatically fluent are not one and the same. I have real experience, because I speak, read, and (terribly) write broken French… more broken with every year that passes! I hope my children are, at a minimum, bi-lingual — but that will be somewhat challenging since we haven’t provided any support in that area, to date.
In any event, I’ll be interested to see how Brent Simmons maintains his leadership position in the MacOS X newsreader space, and whether features or usability will be the determining factor in 2004. Beyond 2004, I expect RSS/feed integration to be so widespread that it will be only be info-junkies (like me) that still use a separate newsreader. Most folks, I expect, will find basic integration of a few sources more than enough. Time will tell.