Download Squad

Now that a lot of people are spending as much time looking at their RSS readers as their web browsers or email clients, it's probably a good idea to give your reader an appearance you can live with. If you happen to use NetNewsWire, one of the most popular RSS apps for OS X, you've got plenty of stylesheets to choose from.

NetNewsWire supports CSS styles, so it's not too difficult to code your own if you happen to have some CSS experience. If you're a CSS newbie, though, don't sweat it: there are plenty of looks to choose from. We went beyond the preloaded styles and picked out some options that should please even the pickiest readers. Some of them not only change the look of NetNewsWire, but add some useful functionality as well. Take a look at our top 10 themes.





AisleOne 2.0 is of the newest themes for NNW, and also one of the best. Strong use of whitespace and a simple black-white-red color scheme make this theme highly readable and well-suited for everyday use.

Spotlight+wrap, by Wolf Rentzsch, takes the Spotlight theme that comes with NetNewsWire, tightens it up a little bit, and wraps overlong headlines into an attractive extra row. If you've been using Spotlight and enjoying it, upgrade to this.

Ollicle Reflex never gets old, because it includes a preferences button that lets you choose between dark and light themes, layed out in either one column or two. We recommend the two-column setup if you're reading a blog like Download Squad, that features many right-aligned images. Reflex also includes a handy del.icio.us Tagometer, showing you how many people have already added del.icio.us tags to the post you're reading, and what they've tagged it with.

Hardcover is both fun and practical. Its strong use of type and unique approach to the header make it read like a playbill or something from McSweeney's. It also comes in two different flavors, to adapt to NetNewsWire's standard or three-column modes. The three-column version is particularly nice.

Readlight is one of the more elegant themes we were able to find, with plenty of space between words and lines for easy reading. The header features some nice text decoration, and the overall look is clean and sharp.

Samurai Coder is a cool green theme with a nice, compact header. It also includes ad-blocking code that obliterates the pesky FeedBurner footers that appear on lots of popular feeds. Grab it for a unique look that happens to complement the Download Squad colors quite nicely.

Simply Structured is another relatively new theme that uses whitespace to keep the elements of each story in order. We recommend it if you're finding other themes too fussy or cluttered.

Feedlight comes in a set of three themes: aqua, graphite and metal. Otherwise, it looks a bit like Spotlight, and shares Spotlight+wrap's wrapping feature (although not quite as attractively.) If you like the "colored bar" look, but you need something other than standard-issue blue, check Feedlight out.

MailX is a very plain, practical theme, designed to mimic the look of -- surprise! -- Apple Mail. Like Mail, it uses Lucida Grande for added legibility. Perhaps it's not the most unique theme out there, but it's simple and effective.

Gundam is just thrown in here for fun, but it does show what you can do with CSS and NetNewsWire. Plug in your own image, make it look however you want.

Installing these themes is as easy as downloading them and double-clicking the file. If you want to see the themes in action before you use them, have a look at our gallery.