Featured Freeware: FeedDemon and NetNewsWire
These well-crafted, standalone newsreaders makes an ideal choice for both novices who've never heard of an RSS feed and advanced users looking to put some oomph and flexibility into their reading habits. As the desktop clients for the online NewsGator, FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Macs both can synchronize bi-directionally with their Web-based counterpart, making it easy to get your feeds wherever and whenever you need them.
Other useful features include a built-in Web browser that's built on Internet Explorer--sorry Firefox and Opera fans, tabbed browsing for when you need to open multiple feeds' Web pages, Watch channels for using keywords to surface feeds, and flags to keep older posts front and center. The integrated podcast manager automatically sends new podcasts to your music jukebox. Along with line-item synchronization, so you don't have to sync all of your feeds, NewsGator's feed-catching clients are definitely not a crock.
Seth peers into the deep, dark corners of software so that you don't have to. He has yet to suffer a single nightmare about OS/2. You can follow him on Twitter. 