Gruml: Free Google Reader for Mac OS X

Google Reader is a very useful service for consuming your news feeds, but it lives in the browser, which means it doesn’t the responsiveness and polish of a desktop app. For all those Mac users out there looking for the best of both worlds, I present to you Gruml, a new desktop Google Reader application.

What’s great about Gruml is that it brings a lot of the features in Google Reader that we’ve come to know and love and brings them into the desktop client, including features like starring, “liking,” and sharing posts (with notes and tags), and reading headlines that friends share with you.

And for those Twitterholics out there who need to tweet their news, Gruml comes with Twitter support, allowing you to tweet articles (converted to short URLs) directly from the app.

It’s important to note that Gruml is still in beta, and has its faults, like running slowly on startup, and missing some settings in the preferences menu. But overall, it’s a great application that runs well and shows promise.