Introduction to Vienna

Vienna is an application that allows you to read RSS or Atom news feeds on your Mac OSX computer. It automates the job of retrieving news articles from all subscribed feeds and storing them in a local database for reading off-line. It provides features that allow you to search feeds for keywords or phrases, tag articles with a flag for future reference and organise related feeds together under groups. You can create smart folders that make it easy to dynamically retrieve and view all articles in the database that match a search criteria. The built-in web browser allows you to go to the articles web page or view links in the article directly in Vienna in separate tabs.

Vienna is designed to be simple and easy to use. A clean, uncluttered, interface maximises the space for articles and just a few controls are needed to perform the most common actions in the user interface.

Getting Started

If this is the first time that you have used Vienna then it will have created a new database for you and added some sample news subscriptions. So go ahead and press Command+T or choose Refresh All Subscriptions from the File menu to grab the latest articles from those subscriptions.

Alternatively, subscribe to your own news feeds. There are various ways to find feeds. When browsing the web, look out for the or XML icons indicating that the page has a feed associated with it. Alternatively almost all online blogging services such as LiveJournal or Blogger provide RSS feeds as an alternative to reading the postings online.

If you know the user name of a blogger on LiveJournal, Blogger, MSN Spaces or Xanga then Vienna makes it easier to subscribe to their news feed. Start by pressing Command+N or from the File menu, choose the New Subscription command. In the "Create a new RSS subscription" panel, pick the blogging service from the drop down list and enter the user name in the input field below. Then choose Subscribe and Vienna will add the subscription to the folder list. If you are connected to the internet at the time, it will also immediately start collecting articles from the feed.

Normally you need to manually tell Vienna when to refresh all your subscriptions. However you can opt to ask Vienna to automatically refresh at time intervals. In the General section of the Preferences, pick the desired time interval from the drop down list next to 'Check for new articles'. Vienna needs to be running for it to automatically refresh subscriptions.

To read articles, press the Spacebar to skip to the next unread article in any subscription. Each article is marked as read automatically after a short delay. If you prefer to wait until you move to the next unread article before the current one is marked read you can adjust the behaviour in the General tab of the Preferences. To mark an article as unread again, choose the Mark Unread command from the Article menu or simply press the 'R' key.

Finally, you can view the article web page or any web page links in an article within Vienna. By default clicking on a web link within Vienna will open the web page in a new tab. Vienna provides a lot of basic web browsing support itself but there may be times when you will prefer to open links in your default web browser. If you prefer to view all web pages outside of Vienna then enable the 'Open links in external browser' option in the General section of the Preferences. However if you prefer to view the current link or page in your external browser, right click on the page and choose the "Open Link in XXX" or "Open Page in XXX" option where XXX will be the name of your default browser.

Once you've got comfortable using Vienna, go ahead and explore the various options. You can change the style in which the articles are displayed through the Style drop down list in the View menu. You can find many more custom styles at the Downloads page on the Vienna web site along with custom scripts that allow you to integrate Vienna with other applications on your machine. Or experiment with smart folders to organise articles according to criteria based on the contents of each article. For example, you can easily set up a smart folder to group together all articles that mention "Joss Whedon" and "Firefly" to find references to the Firefly cult series or the spin-off movie.

If you have any questions about Vienna or run into problems, head over to the Support forum.