A Love Triangle: NetNewsWire and Google Reader

I’m stuck in a love triangle with two popular RSS readers, and I just can’t figure it out. I love them both but for very different reasons (and at very different times).

On the desktop, I prefer NetNewsWire for a variety of reasons:

• Keyboard shortcuts for blog posting, Delicious posting, Twitter posting, etc.
• Easier keyboard navigation
• Sorting by date either ascending or descending
• Natively selecting NetNewsWire as default RSS reader

Of course, I can mimic much of NNW’s keyboard shortcuts using bookmarklets in Safari’s Bookmarks Bar and activating them by using Command plus the number of the correlating bookmarklet. (i.e. Cmd-5 takes my selection and sends it to MarsEdit for blogging.)

But the problem with that is that I have three extra bookmarks in the bar, which starts to clutter it. Too, if I ever add or change a bookmark before the bookmarklets, I’ll have to learn new numbers for my shortcuts. (That may not seem like much, but if you are a power keyboard user and have repetitive actions you use daily, then the change takes a while to learn.)

So there it is, my love for NNW on the desktop is deep and true.

But then there’s the iPhone… I like the NNW iPhone app. I like Newsgator as a syncing system. But I love Google Reader on the iPhone.

Here’s why I prefer Google Reader to NetNewsWire on the iPhone:

• Better syncing. Since you are using a web app versus a syncing service, everything is always in sync.
• Faster. NNW’s iPhone app takes a while to open and sync before you can start using it.
• Mark as unread. You can easily mark items as unread on iPhone. Not so much with the NNW app for iPhone
• Nicer interface. I’m one of those people who loves the Google Reader’s native iPhone interface. I’ve not tried Byline or any other app for Google Reader on the iPhone because Google’s web app is so superb. (OK, no badge telling me how many unread items I have, but I have so many feeds I know I always have something to read. It’s not like email.)

And, so, my love for Google Reader on the desktop is deep and true.

Over the past few days, I’ve tried to use Google Reader on the desktop. And I’ll admit to a couple of pluses for Google Reader:

• It is always “synced” across my multiple laptops, desktops and iPhone (but save for the iPhone, syncing works perfect for NNW)
• I enjoy using the speed of Safari versus NNW’s integrated browser (which is also built on Webkit, like Safari)

I’ve also found a couple of major annoyances.

The main one: There is no way to view the original item in a tab opened in the background.

That’s counter to how I do some of my blogging. For a political news blog I run, I open all the feeds to which I want to link for that day and then I go through them. That kind of work flow is next to impossible with Google Reader.

So what am I to do? If the two products synced together, I’d use NNW on the desktop and Google Reader on my iPhone.

I’ve thought of splitting my feeds between the two, but I can find no logical way of doing so. (Besides, the thought of two RSS readers is absurd to me.)

For now, I’ll continue to test Google Reader on the desktop, but considering I spend way more time in a desktop environment versus my iPhone, I’m betting on NetNewsWire carrying the day.

(But breaking up with Google Reader on the iPhone is going to hurt…)

Tagged as: byline, google reader, iPhone, netnewswire, rss