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Trying something new

Published: August 20, 2006. Filed under: Meta, Usability.

Following up on yesterday’s feed subscription housecleaning, today I noticed that, if you buy a NewsFire license before day’s end you’ll get a nice bonus: Inquisitor thrown in free of charge.

Well, hot damn!

Inquisitor is really the big win for me here; I’m trying to get into the habit of using Safari as my day-to-day browser, since I’m doing lots of JavaScript stuff and — though this is in no way a knock against Dave Hyatt and the WebKit team, or the KHTML team — I’ve always tried to have a policy of using the least capable browser for whatever I’m working on at a given moment. Safari’s JavaScript support is getting better, but there’s stilll a ways to go; more robust support for the (admittedly non-standard) execCommand is apparently coming soon, and that will be a huge, huge win for anyone who’s ever beaten their head against the wall trying to make WYSIWYG rich-text editing work in Safari.

Anyway, Inquisitor rocks my world; it’s the way in-browser search ought to work. But what about NewsFire? I’ve seen some glowing praise from Jon Hicks, whose opinion I respect in all matters design, but can it live up to that standard?

Well. I’m not sure yet.

The bad

A few things did jump out at me immediately, and not in a good way:

The good

NewsFire isn’t without its nice points:

The conclusion?

None just yet. I need to spend a week or two using NewsFire exclusively before I can really compare it to other readers I’ve used, and even if I end up ditching it my twenty dollars won’t have gone to waste because, hey, I got Inquisitor out of it, too.