Headline

A minor update available only to App Store folks? I guess customer service is overrated these days.

Headline has not been discontinued. It's now being offered thought Mac App Store.

This piece of software has been all but abandoned, and this minor update has not fixed any of the 10.6.x instabilities and bugs (beach balls like crazy). Could be a decent, streamlined RSS reader, but needs a lot of love under the hood before it can be used with any confidence. Cannot recommend.

Broken on 10.6, it seems developer moved on to other things and doesn't plan to update it anytime soon. Avoid.

@Admin warning. The download link is broken. Anyway, testing high and low, i found no way to import a OPML (flat or structured) into this thing. Yes, there is an 'Import' menu but...you are asked to register an OPML file NOT to open one. Bah! No Drag and drop of Feeds from Mail/NNW to Headline (single file or multiple files). Animation, yada yada and then the Usability ABC isn't there. Who did the design of this Application from usability POV? Fire him! URL Copy and pasting from NNW result in a malformed URL in the Headline URL field. You have to remove the (unnecessary) trailing space from the URL to get Headline to recognize it. After all this, Headline goes in a wonderful loop trying to validate the URL. I'm here from 5 minutes waiting this damned dialog box to activate the OK button. As you can see for yourself (in the shot), the Feed's titles are often truncated so you have to enlarge the window to accomodate a quick eye scrolling. In this way, the entire UI fill almost the same screen space of, say, NF. Another Usability fault. Good in a shot, bad in everyday workflow. And so on and on. Stick with NNW/NF/Mail. Free, Usable applications and save your money for something valuable.

How can we import something into this damned thing? Manually entering the url doesn't work... Macheist registered user.

The previous user is right - this application is brilliant if you use RSS feeds in a specific way, and I suspect it has been designed with that in mind. If you have a large number of feeds, and read most of them every day, it is not helpful, as the "stream of news" makes it difficult to differentiate between them and the navigation is slow - click on item - pop out summary - close summary - click on next item ... in addition, you are showered with Growl notifications (one per feed), although those may be switched off in Preferences. The traditional three-pane reader is more usable in this instance. However, if you have a small number of feeds, it is very slick. I fall into the first category, but put a couple of my most-used feeds into Headline and like it! The only real problem is that the pop-out item summary takes up a lot of screen space over and above the (small) main window, so that the space saving is not as great as it appears at first. There are also a couple of glitches; marking as read doesn't remove the item from view immediately, and I have found "refresh all" taking up a lot of CPU. Overall, well-designed for a specific task.

With this sort of app, it all depends what you want. I wanted the ability to easy decide I had read enough Apple stuff and push them off the list in front of me. No such luck. Easily see all the feeds from one source, can't manage that (if it's there, it's too well hidden). I won't be feeding RSS feeds out to all and sundry through iChat and Mail, everyone has the ones they want, they don't want me bashing out more messages with what I think they should look at. I'm sure plenty won't agree with me, but it's always personal choice. Plenty of features I won't ever use, not many I will. Seems stable although I'm not going to run it long enough to really tell.

Great application! I've only been playing around with it for a couple of hours and I'm hooked. The UI is awesome. I really like the preview functionality. Headline has all the right parts/features (Growl, Multimedia support, sharing, etc.) while maintaining its sleek, clean interface. Everything is very intuitive - If you're looking for a feed reader that is efficient and doesn't take any time to manage... This is it! Great 1.0 release, keep it up!

I am a big fan of HEADLINE. Do not mess it up with NNW or else, it´s just an unique reader. OPML and manually iport work both great here. Thumbs up!

OPML importing is not working here either, although I can add feeds manually. Is that a limitation of the demo?

I can't add any feed. Either from opml or by manually adding a feed address. Very odd. Maybe it wasn't really ready for version 1?

This looks very cool. Well designed interface and useful features. However, I can't justify spending $20 on a RSS reader when NetNewsWire is available for free.