Vienna, the popular RSS or Atom news feeder for Mac OS X, has received version 2.3.0.2301. The new release drops Panther support, requiring Tiger or greater to run, and adds a number of fixes, one tied specifically to OS X 10.5 Leopard.

The V. 2.3.0.2301 release notes reveal that, aside dropping support for one OS X version, a Leopard fix now allows you to use option-left-arrow and option-right-arrow as keyboard shortcuts for closing and opening group folders. Additional bug fixes were included for when Vienna escaped special query characters (when validating a URL), but also for an assertion failure (when the user enters an invalid URL string in the address bar) and smart folders and German umlauts.

Vienna is a free Mac app that allows you to read RSS or Atom news feeds on your Mac. It automates the job of retrieving news articles from all subscribed feeds and stores them in a local database for off-line reading. Offering features that allow you to search feeds for keywords or phrases, tag articles with a flag for future reference and organize related feeds together under groups, or create smart folders, Vienna is designed to be simple and easy to use. A clean, uncluttered, interface maximizes the space for articles, while few controls are needed to perform the most common actions.

That's not all though. The smart folders you can create make it extremely easy to dynamically retrieve and view all articles in the database that match a search criteria. For example, if I want to see what new announcements have been made regarding Snow Leopard, I just click on the smart folder I've set up for it, which searches for articles that contain “Snow Leopard” or “10.6” in their text bodies. The built-in web browser then allows me to go to the article's web page, or view it directly in Vienna's interface.

A lot of customization options are available, too. You can change the style in which the articles are displayed through the Style drop down list in the View menu, for instance. But we're not going to deny you the fun of discovering more hefty features on your own. Therefore, here's a download link. Remember, the latest version has dropped 10.3 (Panther) support, so you'll need Tiger or higher to run it.