There is a plethora, a regular myriad, of articles out there about the preview of Apple's latest edition of Mac OS X, dubbed Tiger, coming out. Okay, I admit it; I just wanted to say plethora and myriad. Truth be told, excited as I am about Tiger I still find it lacking some features I want, and quite frankly it'll take some getting used to. So if you want to read more about Tiger, I suggest you look here. That article's got plenty.

In the mean time, I am going to turn my focus to Safari. It seems that in this new version of Mac OS X will be a new version of Safari, version 2.0. And in this version will be RSS support. Yeah, you heard me. RSS support. And I'll tell you something else, when Safari provides RSS support I can only think of two aggregators that will survive it: Shrook and NetNewsWire.

I use NetNewsWire Lite myself, and would love to try Shrook out because it's just pretty and looks great. I haven't tried it because I don't want to pay for it and I'm not sure how their version of shareware works. We all know that shareware is a broad term which can mean anything from "free but please register it" to "crippled version that will only work for five days and then you're done." I may give it a try later on today, just to see, but I don't want to get into that. I think Shrook's best shot at survival is going to be releasing a Lite version as well as their fully functional one.

I would move to agree with Brent, author of NetNewsWire, when he said, "It also may mean that Apple will evangelize RSS to publications that haven’t yet adopted it. Which is great: it’s not something we have much time for, and when CNN hears from Apple it carries a bit more weight than when they hear from Ranchero Software." His blog can be found here. My apologies for not providing a permalink to this statement, but he does not appear to provide them himself. The article I speak of was posted at 3:18pm on June 28, 2004.

Of course, Brent also points out that, according to the demo, Safari's RSS reader will not be fully featured. And why should it? To be honest with you, I don't want it in Safari at all. Apple has been very good, thus far, at creating one application to do one thing. iCal for calendars, Mail.app for eMail, AddressBook for vCards. Forget about stuff like Outlook or Entourage. But now they're combining in Safari. I worry about what this signifies. I'd rather see Apple release a separate application. I think that's my final opinion on it, what it all boils down to. I love that Apple is putting their support behind Aggregators, and am thrilled that it may put pressure on folks like CNN to start syndicating, but I worry about the direction it takes Apple software as a whole. I also know that CNN will try to shove ads into their RSS feed if they create one; that's the reason they don't have one as it is -- so that they can serve us with ads when we go through the page.