If you don’t know, Vienna is a freeware, open source RSS/Atom newsreader for the Mac OS X operating system.

I remember I tried out Vienna some while ago and found it rather nice, especially for a free piece of kit in early stages of development. At the time, I was still drinking the NetNewsWire Kool-Aid and didn’t bother making the switch.

That was until recently, when my bud Juanjo brought it back to my attention. We talked about it and both vowed to migrate because Vienna performs better, is free and, most importantly, is Open Source.

I am not going to go as far as claiming that Vienna is better than NetNewsWire, because it isn’t, but it’s not that far behind. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it has most of the features I require for an enjoyable, day-to-day weblog experience. A lot of work is being put into it and there’s a very interesting list of enhancements coming up in version 2.1.

In my mind, open sourcing your code is still a very noble thing to do and that’s the main reason I will always award extra points to Free (as in Open Source Free) apps when comparing them against commercial ones. After all, generating interest in them is an almost sure path to give the contributors incentive to make their application even better.

So, yeah, I did go to Vienna and, for now, I’m staying there. I suggest you do, too.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 12:44 am and is filed under Apple, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.