The BlogBridge folks rolled out a cool update to their RSS reader. The biggest addition is a very handy search tool, strongly inspired by Spotlight. Here's a sample of a quick search to find any posts in any of my feeds which have been published since yesterday, and contain the word "podcasting":
Now that's just plain cool. It was technically possible by creating SmartFeeds in previous versions, but that was a clunky process that wasn't well suited to ad-hoc on-the-fly searches. They've been working on some UI refinements to remove or rethink or hide the geekier things, which is a good thing.
I'd actually tried to switch back to NetNewsWire (with the latest beta release last week) and lasted about 2 days. They're getting closer, in that they're trying to do stuff with "attention", and have syncing with the NewsGator service, but it's just not to the level that BlogBridge has it. I can chew through my feeds soooo much faster in BlogBridge than any other reader I've tried - and I've tried a LOT of readers.
The one thing that NNW does much better than BlogBridge is the ability to load pages in a browser in the background. BlogBridge insists on bringing the browser to the front, so every link clicked to view a post in my browser must be followed immediately with a command+tab to get back to BlogBridge so I can keep plowing through unread items. It's a pretty minor nit, though.
It's a really good upgrade to BlogBridge. I had a minor issue where it wasn't happy with my database files or something, but nuking that and restoring from my copy on the BlogBridge server solved that.