I've always been public about my descisions with which RSS reader to use. Last time I posted about this, I was using Sauce Reader and had found that it was bowing out from aggregator-land. Since then, I've used FeedDemon and have been a pleased, but not really that thrilled. I started using GreatNews and I've found that I like it (even though it's current version is missing a few things).

Since Sauce Reader went belly-up I've went back to trying RSS Bandit, SharpReader, and FeedDemon, but I just couldn't really get into any of them. RSS Bandit is a great one and it just keeps getting better and better. But I am just not that excited about it. I just don't know why. I came across GreatNews when I wasn't even looking for a new reader and gave it a try. There are some things I really like about it but it's missing a few things too.

There's a few things that GreatNews has that really appeal to me. It seems that lately I've been so busy that I start to fall behind on reading content that I'd like to keep up on (can't you tell? I've been slacking on updating my blog). GreatNews has some cool, yet very simple features that make it easy to find content that I don't want to miss. Watches, like search folders, let you pull in posts from other sources that you don't even subscribe to. I can built a watch that allows me to see google results of anyone that links to my blog, or see all feedster (or flickr) results that match some certain criteria. I can have GreatNews highlight certain posts based on keywords I've defined so they stand out from the other posts rolling in. I think that is cool. Not to mention that I really like the UI. It is clean, simple, and just looks nice.

I've spent some time in the GreatNews forums, the developer is easy to work with and makes his nightly builds available for public consumption. Things like support for favicons were suggested in the forums and within a few days I had a new build with the support built in.

What I like about GreatNews:

• Simple and clean UI
• Has the features I want (almost) and not a ton of extras I don't care about
• Free
• Fast/Performs well
• Easy to organize with folders, labels, and watches (search folders)
• Channel Statistics. You can easily see what you look at the most and what subscribed feeds keep most up to date so you're able to fine tune what you spend time reading.
• Automatic post highlighting based on certain keywords or text so have special content stand out.

What I don't like about GreatNews:

• No support for comments! This one is huge, but the developer has committed to adding this. This is really the only thing I wish it had, but hasn't really bothered me too bad so far - I've been using FeedDemon for a bit now which is also missing this so I guess I am used to it.

I'm not saying it's better than the others I've been using. Feature-to-feature RSS Bandit wins there, but I am really liking GreatNews for now and I plan to stick with it for a while.