Winds For Mac

RSS feeds have been around for a very long time, and podcasts have grown in popularity a great deal in the past few years. Many of us use both of these technologies to keep track of news and other developments, but we normally have to rely on separate apps for each of them.

Winds is an attempt to combine your feeds and podcasts into a neat little package. It is an open-source app, also available for Windows, Linux and on the web, that lets you manage all your news sources and podcast series from a single interface.

RSS feeds are used by pretty much every news website to provide users with an easy way to keep track of new content and read it in a simple, standardized format. This app can help you find relevant feeds by asking for your main interests when it is launched for the first time.

There are few ways to innovate when creating an RSS reader, and Winds works well enough, but some improvements are needed. There is no way to change the dimensions of the text panel, and the lack of a dark mode affects reading most of all.

If you haven’t gotten into podcasts yet, this app is a great place to start. It provides recommendations based on the same interests you select for relevant feeds, and you can listen to them without switching to a different application.

The podcast player is quite good, offering most of the features you would expect. You can listen while browsing, skip back or forward, and even speed up playback to get through episodes more efficiently.

The browser-like UI isn’t really an issue, but the lack of visual customization is a major downside. There are no alternative layouts, and the default one can’t be adjusted in any way.

The most visible omission, though, is the lack of a dark mode. No desktop app should lack a dark theme nowadays, especially one that is used for reading.

Overall, Winds provides an impressive service, but the UI is somewhat disappointing. It’s a great choice for users who want to combine their podcast and RSS reader apps, and its algorithms can help you find new and interesting content.