Vienna vs NetNewsWire
I have been using Vienna now for, oh, must be about a year. I have been very happy with it. It does everything I want a RSS reader to do, fetch RSS feeds and tell me when new ones popup. Which reminds me, you can subscribe to mine here. I’m going to take a couple minutes just comparing Vienna to NetNewsWire, which has recently become free.
Load up times
It’s close, and to be honest who cares these days? Once the machine is loaded it stays on for ages. They are both fast. Lets leave it at that.
Looks
They look the same. That is, when you change the style of NetNewsWire to ‘BD Aqua Floating’. Vienna looks better though. Don’t know why, maybe it is because I am used to it. I just like their blue header.
And is it just me or is NetNewsWire sidebar background go grey which it is in the background? Not very Mac-like. Apart from that, when you click the top-right pill they both look the same. Something is telling me I still prefer Vienna though.
Performance
I am lumping several criteria into this category, memory, and speed of the application.
This is where Vienna really shines for me. When opened it uses 15MB RAM. Yes, 15. NetNewsWire takes about 80MB. Although 65MB is relatively nothing (at least with the great memory handling the Mac has) I like to make sure I akways have adequite memory free to just make things that little bit snappier.
CPU usuage. Well, Vienna is non-existant. I don’t think I have ever seen it on the iStatPro widget top 5 CPU culprits, or going wild in Activity Monitor.
NetNewsWire however, boy it is insane. I was watching it in Activity Monitor and the RAM just kept increaseing as it was going into the 5-20% CPU usuage for minutes. What is it doing!
Update: Vienna is updating… Activity Monitor shows 0.0% CPU usuage. Good Vienna :-).
Added extras
I personally don’t want any added extras with it. Why would I want a browser built in? That’s what a browser is for, and what they specialise in. NetNewsWire seems to include a large proportion of bulk. Scriptability, fullscreen (why on Earth would you need a fullscreen option to view RSS feeds? They are snippets of information! Vienna appears to be sleek, and clutter free.
And the winner is…
I think it is pretty obvious. Vienna is clearly the winner for me. in a year of usage it has never once let me down or presented a bug. Within 2 minutes of installing NetNewsWire I was bombarded with popups asking me to create accounts, to sync, to set it as my default RSS reader…Arg! I have kept it on my machine this long, time to zap it.
1 Patrick Mosby wrote
18th January, 2008
NetNewsWire hogs some CPU power when you download a lot of feeds at the same time, for that I’ve set the simultaneous downloads to 5 and that helps a lot.
The other thing that could cause such a CPU spike are flash and video embeds in the feed items.
I really love NetNewsWire for it’s feature richness, but that’s not what you are looking for so I think Vienna is perfect for your needs.
Greetings