NewsBar RSS reader App Reviews

I do not download or buy apps often, but this app is fantastic, especially on a large screen. It makes the desktop screen look very nice, it consistently updates itself, and it keeps me informed of what is going on in the world based off of the news source I chose. This app is honestly a must-have for all mac users. I had a hard time staying aware of what was going on in the world before, so that is why I got this app. I am very impressed and if anyone else is thinking about getting it, it is definitely worth it. It updates itself as new articles are published and never glitches(at least it never has for me). It is definitely an essential and effective tool.

I like the app so far, but am not receiving any News feeds, perhaps because I don’t have it set up perfectly yet. I have only been getting Tech & Sports feeds. When I gget it configured properly, I may rate it 5 stars.

Really delivered a simple to setup and easy to use News Ticker for the side of my screen. Non-intrusive and convenient as a way to keep up with current events without interrupting my workflow.

I don’t really understand RSS. I don’t have any feeds that I know of, and I don’t know where to get them or if I want them. The reason I downloaded this app was so that I could read news related to Apple new releases which I used to do through Google Reader. The app is doing that for me.

I wasn’t sure I was completely crazy about the look of this app until I opened the preferences and realized I can change everything. EVERYTHING. Not just fonts and colors, but sizes of everything, the background gradient, removing all the icons - the list goes on and on. Well done. Also, you can change from a dock icon to a menubar icon. That is NICE.

The Beachballs are driving me crazy. This needs an improvement NOW!

This app has been great to glance though hundreds of headlines at a time and easily save/forward those I found interesting. It is as conspicuous as you would like it to be and syncs with my iOS devices. I was discouraged when the ability to add articles directly to my reading list was lost after a Yosemite upgrade, but the developer was extremely responsive, and it is back working again.

I use this at work to keep on top of project management with JIRA. Not many tools can properly handle the RSS that JIRA generates, and I’ve worked with the very responsive support team to get the JIRA tickets displaying properly. If you’re using JIRA, you’ll want this program!

This is a well executed and supported application. The app settings has Feedly (to syncronize feeds) and Pocket (for Read it Later purposes) tabs. You can also integrate Twitter in the feed by adding @users and #hastags to see them RSS style, but I haven’t feel the need of using that feature yet. Instapaper is not supported. The application is highly configurable, and I like it to have the same color and typeface as the menu bar. For all intents and purposes, it feels to me like an extension of the menu bar (very similar to Notifications), and it is always in the background, available for me to read the Feedly feeds that I subscribe to. NewsBar was Lucida Grande and silver background in Mavericks. I have since updated the operating system to Yosemite and NewsBar mimics the dark menu bar and Helvetica font. I like to place it on the right hand side of the screen, where the Notification Center goes; however, it is a little bit wider (also configurable). I access to it by swiping with 4 fingers (Mission Control gesture) and selecting it. When you click the different news, you can either open them on a browser, which I only do for websites like Macworld or TUAW (because they only provide a limited preview); however, I mostly read them in preview mode. I wish this mode was taller (or at least I could configure it), so I don’t have to scroll as much as I do for articles that contain images. It is a tiny window and feels ridiculous in a 27” screen. I don’t usually contact the developers of the apps that I use it, but I did to get dark menu bar support and he added it to an updated version in 24 hours. It was probably in the works, but still felt great. In all, it is my favorite RSS reader at the time and I enjoy using it.

Great app when it works. I’ve recently had an issue that I sent feedback for. Never heard a thing since. I did it again just to be sure, nothing again. They simply don’t reply or don’t care, or both.

- Preview window resize feature excellent - but it does not “stick” between articles. Add an option to resize once and retain the setting for each subsequent article. - Add a key combination option to delete an article from the currently-focused feed. Right-click to delete is painful for multiple article deletes.

Although this app works well, this version seems to be using quite a bit of processing power (I am not sure how it relates to previous versions). No matter how often you set the timer for checking the feeds, there is a steady drain on the CPU and overall power requirement of the machine. I have also found that setting the preview window to ‘manual’ does not preserve the window size between articles - as was reported in a previous a review. Another issue is that the setting for ‘default RRS reader’ does not stay set and keeps reverting to the email client (at least on my machine). Overall, this is an excellent little app for viewing your RSS feeds as a small and concise list, so I must give credit to the developers.

I was very optimistic about this app when I first got it, but after having it for over a month I have a few comments I’d like to make for future would-be buyers. 1) Although there is the capability of “linking” an twitter account, its almost like linking is just to check a box and get your information before allowing the user to follow live updates. In fact, even though you can “link” your account, you have to go through and manually add everyone you want to follow in-app. Considering how it’s no real difficulty to use the twitter API and populate a list of the accounts being followed (especially after an application has been linked to your account in the sense that it knows your password), it doesn’t make sense that I should have to go through and manually add each user I follow if I’m paying for an app. I wasn’t aware of this when I purchased the app and it would have been a definite no-go if I had known beforehand. 2) As mentioned in a previous review, this app uses an unbelievable amount of CPU power. Whist this wouldn’t be a problem under most circumstances, Newsbar is an RSS feed reader; there is no excuse for having such an immense amount of processing power being devoted to what should be an unobtrusive application. Related: by commandeering CPU activity, this app not only insures that your computer will be unbearably hot, but also guarantees your mac’s fan will be running full speed and causing a ruckus. And I have the top of the line Mac Book Pro, purchased in late 2014. There is no reason this app should have such an effect on my computer. 3) I haven’t even gotten into how this app doesn’t work as advertised. Even if everything I’ve written above wasn’t the case, this app actually doesn’t work! It doesn’t update in the times you designate in the menu section, it doesn’t pull new information as it’s made public on your subscribed RSS feeds, and most importantly it crashes by giving the user the rainbow spinning pinwheel anytime he tries to click on a section of your screen it’s occupying. This isn’t an “every once-in-a-while” event, it happens on a consistent basis roughly 80% of the time by my count when the app starts up. I wish I could give this app a better review because it seemed to be just the thing I needed when I began searching for RSS feed GUIs. However, I paid $4.00 and was left with a piece of junk software that oversold and underperformed.

All works just fine and I like the customization features. However, like most news readers apparently, you only get a very short sample of the news article when you click on a box. You have to go to the site for the whole story. I was looking for a news reader that would put the entire text of the article in the reader box once I clicked on it. This needs to be more clear in the description with this reader and others. Other than that, works really well. If you just want a headline scroll and the option to link right to the site, it’s a great app to use and I strongly recommend.

This review is for version 3.7.1 I don’t typically review apps other than leaving ratings, but this is exceptional. I have been using NewBar for a few years and this is one of the most important apps that i use on a daily basis. There is way too much news and information out there and NewsBar helps me to manage and consume all that news- in an unintrusive and convenient way. I reached out ot Andras a couple of weeks ago to report a bug (around CPU utilization when using Twitter feeds) and that was quickly fixed in this release. Andras was very professional and timely in his responses. This is the best RSS/news aggregator app for OS X available today (Mar 2015). Give it a try, you won’t regret it!

First of all, it’s a reliable RSS viewer. If you want it out of the way, it’s out of the way, if you want transparency you can have it, if you want different kinds of feeds to have different colors, no problem. If you want updates only rarely (less distracting) or more timely: sure. This (or something very much like it) is an excellent way to keep an eye on changing feeds without being overwhelmed. I don’t know if there are other apps “very much like it” or not: but this one has been reliably working for me for years.

works as expected. great app.

I’ve had this app the last few years on my mobile devices and iMac desktop. As of the last month, it has stopped working for the iMac, but still works fine for mobile devices. I did all the troubleshooting. My iMac is new with the latest OX system. Some days, the RSS feeder is blank, some days, it lists only half of my feeds, then it never updates. I’ve tried re-installing and does the same thing. Somewhere along the line, an update went wrong!

i get the spining “wait” icon more than I should, and for longer than I’d expect. That said, I still highly recommend it. It hasn’t been buggy or crashed on me as previous RSS readers have. I really couldn’t ask much more than this. I’m a freelance artist and I use this to keep tabs on all of the Seeking Artist ads that people may be posting around the nation. I made over $20k last month responding just to ads that came through my RSS reader, I couldn’t have scowered the internet and found what I did on my own. This has been very useful to me.

This app seems so far to work very well. I like the ways you can customize it, but I would like to see one change. The tabs which you click on to open eacn folder are way too small, I cant read them, and there doesnt seem to be any way to adjust them. Ill just have to memorize which one is which in order to know if Im clicking on news or sports or science or what-ever. You can have as many categories as you like, which is nice, but that doesnt help much if you cant ttell which is which without getting out a magnifying glass. Id give this a 5 if it werent for that little issue. Otherwise it works very well. You can add RSS feeds from anywhere that offers them, I found Reuters to be a good place to start. It took a liitle time to figure out how to get started, but once you get going its pretty easy. It comes with news from USA Today alresady there, but the feed doesnt work, so at first I thought the app was crap, but it was just that one feed that was the problem. Overall it seems to be pretty good, and a convenient way to organize all of your RSS feeds.