We have seen dozens of RSS Readers for Mac till now. Apps like Reeder, Pulp and NetNewsWire are enough to subscribe to favorite feeds, and they give tons of features like syncing, sharing and support for later reading services like Instapaper and Pocket.
I am currently using Monotony app for RSS updates. I prefer to consume news from the original websites rather than reading them on the app. Monotony is a very simple RSS Feed app which just uses Growl, or OS X's Notification Center to notify the new updates from the subscribed sites.
The only thing that disappoints me about Monotony is that it doesn't allows user to export or import OPML. The last update was in March of last year, and I don't think the developer is going to release a new version anytime soon with the mentioned features.
Today, I found a nice app that may replace Monotony. Leaf, is a clean and feature-rich RSS Reader Mac app.
Leaf is a RSS notifier plus it also features a RSS reader. Just like Monotony, Leaf uses OS X's Notification Center to push RSS notifications. You can use it locally or you can also use it to manage your Feedly subscriptions.
The Interface
The app's interface is pretty much same as other apps in the category. It displays the Feed titles in one column, and after clicking on any of the feed title, we get the full feed on the right column with includes the Feed Title and the content. It also supports full screen mode.
Setting Up Leaf
You can open app preferences to add the RSS feeds to subscribe. If you already have a OPML file, you can import it too. While subscribing to feeds, you can add the feed link, or you can search for a term to subscribe to a site. Once you search for a term, it displays all the sites which are relevant to the term you searched, after selecting a site, you can subscribe to that site.
You can manage all your subscribed feeds in the Subscriptions tab. The app basically displays the Feed content in two different forms, one is the normal view and the other is it displays the original site preview in the RSS Reader column. You can manage whether you want the normal view or the site view(site preview) for individual feeds.
You can also hide or show feeds individually. One nice thing is you can organize your feeds by creating folders. You can move feeds into a folder.
General options includes number of articles per feed, manual refresh, refresh interval and option to set what to do when a new article arrives, which you can choose between "Play Sound" which will play a notification sound when an article arrives, "Read it" which will open the article in the Leaf's RSS Reader or you can also set "Do Nothing". You can disable auto-refreshing if you want to manually refresh the feeds.
The app allows you to filter the articles. By default, the app contains "Unread" or "Starred" filters, and you can also create your own filters. It is a bit of advanced stuff.
You can customize the News Reader appearance in the "News Reader" tab in app preferences. You can choose between 5 themes for news reader, Default, Paper, Coffee, Dark and Clean. You can also change the font size for the text in news reader.
The app gives you the option to enable or disable services for sharing the article. Apart from Twitter, Facebook and Email, you can also enable Pocket, Instapaper, Readability and other services.
Apart from all these options, the app also notifies on new articles in Notifications Center. It also displays the unread count in the dock icon.
Final Thoughts
The app is nice in many ways. The features that Leaf app gives is sufficient for users like me who just want be updated. The app handles the subscriptions well.
What I didn't like about Leaf is the font that is used in the Article titles in the articles list. The interface will look nice if they use Helvetica or some nice sans font, the condensed font that they are using doesn't looks good at all.
Also, an option to hide the unread count in the dock icon will be nice.