Mobile RSS that syncs with your Desktop/Laptop

TjL writes: NetNewsWire 2.1 (Mac) is out.

Why do I tell this to a bunch of Palm users?

Because NetNewsWire 2.1 is the first non-beta version to sync with NewsGator (Windows users, checkout FeedDemon which is also compatible with NewsGator).

What is NewsGator Online?

Well, it's like IMAP... for RSS.

If you use IMAP for email, you know that you can read/file/delete messages at any computer and all of your changes will be reflected on all of the other computers that you might use.

Well, NewsGator Online is like that too. If you want to read news online, you can do that. Want to read them on your computer? You can do that too. Want to read them on your Palm? Yeah, go ahead. All of your changes will be synced.

This is the killer mobile RSS reader I’ve been waiting for.

I have 700+ unread RSS items in NetNewsWire. Other “online” versions I looked at wouldn’t consider those 700+ unread because I have already downloaded them to my computer.

But, as we learned from our experience with email, just because I’ve downloaded it doesn’t mean I’ve read it.

This is where NetNewsWire (or FeedDemon) and NewsGator shine. I can setup my account with NewsGator and tell it which of my subscribed feeds I want to be able to read online (or “All of them”). I can read them easily on my Treo, and then mark them as read when I’m finished. Next time I sync NetNewsWire, it will notice what messages are read, and I won’t have to waste time looking through there myself.

It even syncs the folders that I have used to group feeds!

For any Mac user not using NetNewsWire, checkout the list of changes in NetNewsWire 2.1. This is a .1 free upgrade. NetNewsWire also comes with a 2 year subscription for NewsGator. They offer a free NewsGator account, but it doesn’t have the mobile option.

NOTE: Some of you may think (like I did), “Well, I’ll just use a free NewsGator account and read it online using Blazer or the awesome Opera Mini. It won’t work. I don’t know whether this was intentional or not, but it is completely incompatible. If I were a cynic I might say this was done solely to drive sales of their $20/year Premium Package.

However, I can tell you that in my testing (I have been beta testing NetNewsWire and NewsGator Online for the past few weeks), the experience is flawless. NetNewsWire automatically syncs whenever you Refresh, and it works well even over my crappy dialup connection at home.

I wish that NewsGator Online would offer a free 30 day trial of their Mobile Edition. I think people would get hooked. I think I am.