Benjamin Pasero has released of RSSOwl 1.1.1, an open source RSS reader written in Java and based on the SWT toolkit. RSSOwl is the best open source RSS client I've seen written in Java. That said, it still doesn't feel right to me. Even ignoring various small bugs and user interface inconsistencies, news just doesn't flow in this client. The three-pane layout that separates the news item titles from each news item doesn't work well for me.
Ranchero has released NetNewsWire 2.0, a closed source RSS client for the Mac. It's available in both free-beer lite and $29 payware versions. Version 2.0 removes the weblog editor and adds Atom support, flagged items, searching, news persistence, and an embedded browser. The payware version has a nice combined view that might actually convince me to finally start making heavy use of RSS. Or it would if the page up and page down keys worked in this view, but they don't. :-( I wonder why devlopers don't seem to understand that the purpose of these readers is to page through large quantities of information from multiple different sites as quickly as possible. Having to individually select each item gets in the way of that.
I guess RSS readers are a new field, but I remain amazed at the little annoyances like this that prevent me from adopting RSS/Atom. If this were open source I'd fix it myself, but it's not. If RSSOwl were written to Swing, I could fix the problems there; but since it's written to SWT, I don't have the competence to do that. Ditto for Sage. I have fixed a few bugs in Sage, but the whole XUL process is too far afield from what I normally do for me to get seriously involved. JNN is written in Java, and uses Swing as the widget toolkit. However, the developers have ignored the patches and bug reports I've sent in; and I'm not sure it's worth forking. If I want to maintain my own client, I'd probably start from scratch and release it under the GPL. The server based HTML clients have decent interfaces, but horrible privacy issues. Oh well, I suppose over time the bugs will get worked out.