Just before Christmas, I switched my news aggregator from Bloglines to NewsGator, largely because their iPhone client is better. Being a Mac user, I also grabbed their famous OSX client, NetNewsWire. In all it’s been a very satisfactory switch; NewsGator for iPhone works great for checking my feeds on the train (which was the main driver for my getting the iPhone in the first place,) and NetNewsWire lives up to its reputation - it really does have a great news reading interface. Also, being a Mac only application, it cuts down on the temptation to read during work hours (on my Work PC,) which can only be a good thing.

The only fly in the ointment was that NetNewsWire was shareware, so I was going to have to pay to read my news. After about an hour using it, I knew that it was well worth the asking price and that I wasn’t going to resent paying at all, so that ceased being a problem, and I got stuck into my trial period.

Having already decided that NetNewsWire was worth my money, it came as a bit of a shock to discover that somewhere during my trial period NewsGator have made it free. That’s right during exactly the right thirty days, a fantastic piece of software has transitioned from Shareware to Freeware.

I know I might sometimes overuse the phrase, but, you know what? Sod it, this time it’s really appropriate:

FTW!