My experience with Amphetadesk is two-fold: The first time I tried to install it, it wanted to download a truckload of perl modules from CPAN and I killed the install. Who has time for "some assembly required" installation, especially on a Mac? The second time I tried, I'd spent most of a morning (weeks later) trying to install a Perl script to convert an rss feed into html -- an effort which eventually failed for much the same reason as effort 1, above. Within moments after giving up yet in in disgust, I found a no-nonsense script called rubric at RubyForge that meets my rss2html needs exactly. But as a side effect of all this foofarah, I discovered I'd installed sufficient Perl modules to run Amphetadesk. Which is interesting. Yes, it works. No, it doesn't display enough of the content actually available in standard RSS 2.0 (not counting Userland extensions) newsfeeds. And it's not that configurable. And it exposes an advanced user settings interface for you to dork around with proxy settings and other geeks-only stuff. But it does make a limited, rather nice display of a valid RSS in your web browser. That's kind of cool, especially for a pre version 1.0 app. So, bottom line -- damnation with faint praise. Most people will be better off with NetNewsWire Lite, also free, but this has a few geek-level uses and some ways to get even more interesting as the future unfolds.