endo… it’s NO NetNewsWire

I am a big NetNewsWire fan, but yesterday I saw this review of endo over at TUAW. endo is a new RSS reader, brought to you by the same developer who makes ecto, the desktop blogging client.

David Chartier, the author of the endo review, states that endo is so good, it has replaced NNW as his reader of choice. His praise was so high, that I just had to try endo for myself.

It didn’t take long to realize that I couldn’t DISagree more with David’s review. endo has a few nice features, but it’s no NetNewsWire.

I think endo may work for some people, if they monitor a very small number of feeds, and organize them into a limited number of groups. I monitor a few hundred feeds, organized into roughly 30-40 groups. endo is just not equipped to handle this much information.

NNW uses a three-pane system, much like Apple’s Mail application, with feeds and groups on the left, headlines in the upper right, and stories in the lower right. I’ve found this to be the most efficient way of quickly going through the stories.

endo puts groups on the menu bar, feeds on the left, and stories on the right. If you have more groups than what will fit on the menu bar, the list gets cut off. The only way to view the missing groups is to click on the last visible group on either side. Doing this makes that group snap to the middle of the window, revealing what is on the other side of it. Depending on the number of groups you have, it may take several clicks on the end of the list to force it to rotate around to the one you want. Not having a way to go straight to the group you want was extremely frustrating, and time consuming. It was also a little disorienting not knowing exactly when the group you were looking for would come around again.

Once you actually manage to get to the group you want, the list of feeds for that group is displayed on the left. For your sake I hope it’s a small list. By default, all the feeds are open (a list view), leaving you with one incredibly long list of feeds / stories to scroll through.

There was one part of David’s review that I will agree with. NNW hasn’t seen an update in a while and is looking a little dated. I would love to see some new features added. However, for the amount of information I track, endo just wasn’t up to the task. I found endo to be a chore to use, to say the least. I’ll stick with NetNewsWire.