RSS Feeds seem to be everywhere these days. With growing popularity and the sheer number of websites offering RSS Feeds, the search for good RSS Feed readers gains significance.

Before you tell more about Headline, I’d like to ask you which feed reader you use and what are the things that you like/dislike about it the most? I for one use Google reader as my primary feed reader and I am happy with it.

Ever since RSS has started to make attention into the mainstream the need for more functional RSS feed readers with a much more intuitive UI has arised and Headline aims to exactly fill that void.

Simply put Headline is a revolution in feed reading. It combines a sleek, clean interface with a powerful user experience.

Yes Headlines is one of the most stunning looking RSS feed readers I’ve ever seen. Its not only about its stunning looks but it also offers a range of features that you find in almost feed readers plus some more that you won’t find elsewhere.

Let me just rundown through the important features of Headline.

• Easy Filtering

Headline allows you to easily filter out contents switching from Today, This Week, This Month, All, Unread or Favorites items.

• Sharing

Headline can easily share articles to friends over iChat and Mail. No need to manually find, copy and send links to friends, Headline do it for you.

• Media Player

Headline has built in support for Audio and Video player. You can easily listen audio or watch video podcasts on the fly with out downloading any files.

• Core Animation

Headline starts with a revolutionary interface and then gets better. Core Animation provides smooth effects between views and articles.

• Beautiful Preview

Headline can easily preview any article, mimics Quick Look, without opening the default browser or an external application for that.

• Growl Notification

Headline can automatically notify you when there are new articles available via Growl Notifications. It allows you to see when there are new articles while using other applications.

Quite an impressive feature set I must say. I just wonder why doesn’t windows see such beautiful functional softwares. Here are some screenshots of Headline for you to drool over.

On the Mac I know many users swear by NetNewsWire, but to all those hardcore fans of NetNewsWire I suggest you give Headline a try.

Headline comes in at 19.95$ for a single user licence and is also available for 34.95$ for a Family Pack Licence.

Like other web apps that are designed for the iPhone interface, Google Reader fits very well in Firefox (and other browsers) sidebar.

Looks nice isn’t it? Adding one to your own Firefox is simple. Just follow these steps..

• Open the Bookmarks Manager (Bookmarks/Organize Bookmarks)
• If you are using Firefox 2, then in the File menu select New bookmark and in Firefox 3, press Organize in the toolbar and select New bookmark
• Enter a name, http://www.google.com/reader/i/ for location, and ensure to check Load this bookmark in the sidebar.
• Press Save Changes and now you can select the bookmark to load Google Reader in the sidebar.

Here are some more services which work very well with Firefox Sidebar. To use any of these follow the instruction as above, and just replace the location URL when required. 

• Facebook Chat, use the location as http://www.facebook.com/presence/popout.php
• Netvibes Mobile, use the location as http://iphone.netvibes.com/
• Zoho Mobile, use the location as http://mini.zoho.com/
• Facebook for iPhone, use the location as http://iphone.facebook.com/

Know about some more cool services that work well in the Firefox sidebar. Drop in your comments so that everyone can know about it..

For those of you who are big fans of Google Reader, here’s an app that you must check out. You’ll love this new Adobe AIR app called ReadAIR that completely syncs with Google Reader and has the same basic layout as Google Reader, so you should have no problems starting out.

You could be easily be fooled into thinking that this app was developed by Google because it is that well polished. It features full synchronization with your Google Reader account and requires you to log in with your credentials the first time you use it.  The viewing panes can be resized but the columns in the list view can’t. It also has a search feature for going through all of those feeds and you can use tags as well as add or delete subscriptions. Sounds cool eh!

The interface of ReadAIR has been designed keeping OSX in mind, but it surely does look good on Windows machines as well. The UI is simple and effective and is a joy to use. There are some important features missing at the moment, but the developer plans to add it as soon as possible. Here’s what the developer has in the pipeline :

• Offline mode
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Windows XP/Vista and custom themes
• Unread count in Mac doc icon

I can’t wait for keyboard shortcuts to be a part of ReadAIR. I found myself using J for next item and S for starring it while playing around with ReadAIR, such is the striking resemblances between Google Reader and ReadAIR.. For the first release ReadAIR looks promising indeed. I suggest you all to give it a try.

Download ReadAIR from here

The addition of Drag Drop will be greatly helpful to all those feed junkies out there, because from now, you don’t have to use all those menu’s to arrange your feeds in folders. The other new feature is Recommendations, which suggests feeds that you must read, on the basis of your Feed reading history and your Web Search History. The Feeds that Google Reader suggested for me, were not the kind of stuff I read regularly, so I guess the algorithms need some tweaking.

Google has also rolled out one significant update to Blogger today, and that is, you can now leave comments on blogs using OpenID. Until now you needed a Blogger or Google account if you didn’t want to leave an anonymous comment.

Sharing the starred items isn’t that difficult, the only problem is that the option is quite hidden so we need to search for it.  Follow the instructions below to share your Starred items in Google Reader.

• From Google Reader, click the Settings Link in the upper right hand corner.

• Click the Tags tab.
• Click the Private link beside your starred items.

• The text will change to public and links will appear that allow you to share your starred items feed link.

Well that is it. I hope that this simple tutorial was helpful to you..

Via Tech Recipes

Along with the Search option that also features infinite scrolling to see those thousands of results, Google Reader also has a wide pane option that gives you more reading space than the conventional layout of Google Reader by removing the sidebar in the left.

Here are some screenshots that I took from my Google Reader Screen :

  

With all these new stuff that is Being added to reader all the time, I can tell for sure that Google is heading in the Right direction with Google Reader.

Via Google Reader Blog