I can’t stand the thought of having two separate RSS reader/aggregators, one for my normal (non-audio) feeds and one for the podcasts. NetNewsWire is delivering on the promise of integrating both into a single reader.

The first public beta of Ranchero’s upcoming NetNewsWire 2.0 convinced me that it was the real deal. It seamlessly integrates RSS and Atom feeds in a single, elegant UI for me, and for audio enclosures, it takes care of the downloading and placing it into a playlist I’ve designated in iTues. In short, while it is beta code and has a few quirks, this is pretty close to nirvana.

Besides enclosure support, one of the handiest features of the full, paid-for version is the ability to set a custom refresh schedule. That way I can aggressively check sites that are updated often, like a news site, but avoid polling podcast feeds that post new content less frequently. I rarely sync my iPod more than once daily, anyway.

A new beta release for both the full and Lite versions was posted on Friday. The primary advantage – and this is considerable, in my opinion – is that it’s much faster than it was. You may not notice much on a faster machine but it was a tremendous improvement on my aging G4 Cube.

This is a really nice upgrade to a tool I use every day. Kudos to Ranchero Software on both design and execution. Keep ’em coming, folks.