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Chill Pill brings RSS Fever to your desktop

08.09.2009
Today's RSS-client market is dominated by and Google Reader, in no small part because both are good and free. But folks on the lookout for a different--better, some say--experience have been checking out , a self-hosted, Web-based reader with a flexible interface and a fresh approach to slicing through the Internet's thick jungle of news. Mac users now have another big reason to take a look: , a free desktop client for Fever.

(Some background on Fever: Fever costs $30 and is self-hosted, which means you need to have your own Web host that runs Apache, PHP, and MySQL, so it certainly isn't for everyone. Accessing Fever in your browser provides an interface with a list of feeds and groups folders on the left, and the main reading pane for headlines and articles on the right. One of Fever's key features is its Hot list that displays the "important" discussions occurring across your feeds. Each original piece of news is listed with a collection of articles related to that news. In other words, Fever does all the work to let you browse by topic. This feature and other organization options actually encourage you to subscribe to even more feeds and build your own personal, intelligent corner of the Web.)

On Chill Pill's initial run, it asks for your Fever URL. At first glance, the program doesn't seem to offer much more than if you'd created a Fever-specific browser with . Fortunately, Chill Pill has some cool tricks up its sleeve.

For example, a handful of preferences allow you to better integrate Fever with your Mac, allowing you to customize alerts, choose whether links to sites are opened in your default browser in the background, and more. You can also set Chill Pill to be your Mac's default RSS reader--something Fever, being a Web app, cannot do on its own. Clicking an RSS link in Safari, Firefox, or elsewhere will thus open a dialog within Chill Pill, where you can customize which Fever group(s) the new feed gets added to, as well as configure Fever's other feed-handling features.

One of Chill Pill's best features is its support for styles that can customize Fever's appearance and interface. A great example of these styles is called Stacked, which moves Fever's list of feeds below the list of groups to free up more space. Another style, called "Clean," reorganizes or hides some of Fever's panels to make more room for reading space.

One of the most notable advantages of Chill Pill over Fever in your browser is the capability to customize Fever's many keyboard shortcuts. In fact, since Chill Pill offers menu options and shortcuts for features that don't have keyboard shortcuts in Fever itself, Chill Pill provides far more customization than Fever.