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.

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