Monotony

Monotony is a feed reader doing exactly one job: Subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds, Monotony checks for new feed entries every minute while it is running.

New entries (not: all feed entries) will be displayed on the desktop as notifications, featuring the headline and a summary (if there's one). To read a news item in your default web browser, just click on the notification.

There is nothing else. Monotony will not show feed entries for the past, i.e. for times when it wasn't running. There is no sync, no frontend, no possibility to customize it. Monotony runs as a menubar app or, if you choose, invisible in the background. That's all.

Monotony uses either Growl or the OS X Notification Center to display notifications.