Shrook is a fully-featured RSS and Atom reader for OS X. It seems that a while ago Shrook's author "declared war" on NetNewsWire, and his tactic? Make Shrook freeware. Well, it's a good move. He insists that Shrook is better than NetNewsWire. Is it?

You'll have to be the judge of quality. Having been a NetNewsWire Lite user for years, it's hard for me to give Shrook a fair chance. I am, however, trying. Shrook is a fully featured application to the Lite version of another. I can't say that's not a draw. The interface is a little counterintuitive, I think. NetNewsWire mimics the Mail.app way of thinking - Groups (or mailboxes) on the left, contents of the group (or mailbox) in the top of the main box, and body of that content in the bottom. Shrook is more unorthodox, providing a series of colums which you navigate through. You start with Source, which can be your main library or groups you create - even smart groups - then move on to channel (or all channels in the given group), then items within that channel, then the body. All of this moves left to right, if you can picture it.

Shrook doesn't have much NetNewsWire Lite doesn't have, but one thing it does have is the ability to show web pages instead of the contents of the RSS feed. For me, some of the sites I read only have excerpts where I'd like to read the entire entry in my aggregator. Now I can. There are down sides, too, such as not being able to turn off Previews when showing contents of all channels, but I think that as development moves forward we'll be seeing things get better with Shrook.