We’re once again back to my favorite Mac apps, by popular demand. This time I’ll be showing you a program called Vienna, a popular free RSS reader. It can revolutionize the way you consume information on the Internet, even if you’re not a “techie.” This review is geared toward newbies to RSS.

A quick aside about RSS for the uninitiated: RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” and it’s a standardized way for web sites to provide their content to third parties. It’s an extremely popular and convenient way to quickly consume a large amount of information from various web sources. If you want to learn more about RSS, check out the Wikipedia article.

Now that we’re up to speed on RSS, let’s look at Vienna. Vienna is a free program for OS X that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds from any site on the ‘net and manage them with ease. It’s ridiculously easy to add a feed: in most cases, you’ll see one of these icons at the right in your browser’s address bar when a page you’re looking at has a feed available. You just click it, and if you’ve already defined Vienna as your default RSS reader it is instantly added. It’s that simple. You can also add feeds by inputting the URL directly into Vienna. The real beauty, however, comes how Vienna helps you manage a large number of feeds.

What you wind up with after subscribing to various sites’ feeds is a nice list of all your sites in the left-hand pane, with a number next to each name indicating how many unread stories or posts are present for each site. When viewing a site’s feed, the rest of the window is split horizontally in a familiar email-like configuration with the story list on top and the text of the selected story on the bottom. This is all customizable, but the default layout works quite well. In general, if you are familiar with iTunes playlists and can use an email program, you’ll feel right at home with Vienna’s interface.

Speaking of which, one of the most powerful features of Vienna is to setup smart folders, similar to iTunes’ smart playlists. This allows you to form a collection of stories from all your feeds that match certain criteria. For example, I subscribe to the MacUpdate.com RSS feed, a web site that lists Mac software (which helps me discover cool new apps). There are so many entries on that feed every day, however, because a new entry will come through the RSS every time there is something as minor as a bug fix for a program, that it is too time-consuming to look through them all. I am really only interested in free software, which might make up 25% of these entries. So I created a smart folder that only shows me entries from that specific feed that have the word “free” in them. You can add as many rules as you want, defining parameters relating to posting date, author name, subject, etc. This allows you to really fine-tune what kinds of stories you will spend your time reading, if the straight feeds are to disparate for you.

Vienna’s other noteworthy features include a built-in web browser (for those times when you want to follow a link that might be in a feed story), various themes for story display, auto-updates for your feeds at time intervals you specify, live search-as-you-type, and a lot more. It’s quite a nice program, especially considering that it is free. Try it out; almost every web site out there has an RSS feed now, and a program like Vienna can substantially reduce the amount of time you spend trapsing around to your regular web sites. It also has the nice side effects of presenting your desired content in a uniform, clean, ad-free aesthetic. See if it doesn’t change the way you consume content on the Internet.

Download Vienna