Cyndicate: New Kid on the Block
Posted by Greg Healy on 10/9/07 in Home & Personal, Internet, Organization, Web
The world of Mac RSS readers is a crowded one. With paid solutions like NewsFire and NetNewsWire, and free ones like Vienna and Google Reader, there are plenty to choose from. Of course, with any RSS reader, there is room to improve. If you have found no other RSS readers on the market that have been able to find the balance between ease of use and power, there is now another alternative, Cyndicate.
Cyndicate v1.0 from Cynical Peak Software was released at the first of August. Being a new player to the RSS game, Cyndicate has some pretty big shoes to fill, but in the end, I felt that Cyndicate did a pretty good job.
For almost 6 months, I had been using NewsFire as my default news aggregator. Upon opening Cyndicate for the first time, I was greeted with a view that I was very unfamiliar with. Cyndicate has two main sidebar views, a feed view and a folder view. The feed view gives you a list of all your subscriptions and how many unread are in each. The folder view lets you create folders and assign attributes to each. For example, you can have all of your Mac related feeds dumped into one folder, while your hockey related feeds sort into another.
Cyndicate lets you set up two different folders. The first is just a normal folder, and the second is Smart Folders. You can set up filters in the preferences to filter articles and feeds into normal folders, or just drag and drop articles. Smart Folders work very similar to Smart Playlists in iTunes. You set up criteria, and all articles that fit that criteria are added to that folder.
At first, I wasn’t a big fan of having 2 separate views. Particularly, I didn’t really like the folder view. As I had been using NewsFire for the longest time, I was used to the way that it handled feed reading. In Cyndicate, it’s different. The article is king. Let me just set up a hypothetical situation here. Lets say I am subscribed to 3 different sports sites. I can set up a folder that will have any “hockey” related articles from those feeds filtered into it, while any “football” related articles will be filtered into another folder. In this way you can quickly see all of your hockey related articles without having to dig through multiple subscriptions. It took a bit of setting up to get this system to work for me, but after I was finished, feed reading became much quicker.
This methodology took me a little time to get used to, and it probably will for you as well. If you have primarily used NetNewsWire or another reader for all your RSS reading needs, Cyndicate could be a big change, but can pay off in the end. With that said, there will be those who dislike the way Cyndicate handles feeds and articles. Everyone likes their information presented differently.
Now onto another part of Cyndicate’s interface, the feed item pane. The feed item pane (pictured below) is pretty much your standard view. A blue dot indicates an unread article, and a yellow dot indicates the article has been updated. There are columns that display the subscription, title, author, date posted, rating and size. You can customize the columns to your liking while also adding 2 additional columns (date received and label) which are not turned on by default.
Clicking an article will display it in the article pane, while also giving you the option of deleting that article. To delete all articles in a subscription, or mark all articles as read, hold down the “option” key to change “Delete” to “Delete All” and “Mark Unread” to “Mark All Read.”
The last part of Cyndicate’s 3-pane view is the article pane. This is were you actually read the article (which I hear is kind of important for an RSS reader). There are 30+ different skins for this pane (I settled on “Daring Blue Bar”) so hopefully you can find one that works for you. You can also change the font and font size.
Right-clicking on a subscription in the sidebar will give you a few different options for that subscription. Clicking “Edit Subscription” will bring up a window with information about that subscription, and a few options. the option that I was most interested in is “Display.” You can set Cyndicate to either display the Feed Content or the Permalink Content. Feed Content is just your normal view, while Permalink Content uses webkit to display the webpage where the article is stored. This is useful for feeds that require you to click through to see the entire article.
Cyndicate can be customized any number of ways, it’s all about getting it customized to fit your needs. This review—though it may seem long—still doesn’t cover all of Cyndicate’s functionality, so I suggest you give it a try. I know that many of you have found an RSS reader that perfectly suits you, so Cyndicate may not be for you. Though if reading RSS feeds has become a chore for you with your current RSS reader, it may be time for a change. You can grab Cyndicate for $29.95 USD from Cynical Peak Software.
What RSS reader do you currently use? Does Cyndicate sound like an RSS reader that you could see yourself using? If not, why is your current reader better? I have also been working on a review of NetNewsWire 3, so keep an eye out for that in the near future.
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