Most of you know I have been increasingly disatisfied macs the last couple of years, so much so that I was about to sell off my last mac. It’s not OS X so much, in fact there are aspects of it I love, it’s mostly an issue of them being so goddamned slow, I mean ridiculously slow compared to pc’s. Mac bigots seem to just turn a blind eye on this subject, but I run both platforms and macs just suck speedwise, especially web browsing which is like 94% of my waking life (and yes, safari helps loads but it’s still no contest). Anyway I was about to ditch the laptop and enter a pc only world, but Kevin and I struck a deal and I’m getting his old mac desktop. Pretty much the only reason I decided to do this is because of Net Newswire. This program is changing how I surf the web radically and greatly increasing the amount of info I can absorb in the same amount of time. I absolutely love it. It’s a class of application known as an RSS aggregator, it allows you to pull together article headings from tons of websites (including this one) into an outline view that’s extremely easy to parse through.

There are RSS aggregators for the PC as well, but none nearly as elegant as Net Newswire. I’ll do a writeup of some alternatives this weekend, but if you’re on a mac box, by all means go grab it and take it for a spin, it’s superb.

(oh and the new mac will also be running snipsnap and another webserver at home, I want a playground for python and some other tools, so I guess net newswire wasn’t the only reason I wanted the mac desktop, it was just the main reason).