I'm on a Delta flight from San Francisco to Cincinnati, trying to come up with a column somewhere over the Rockies. I've got the middle seat in a row of three on a completely booked flight. This cramped Boeing 737 seems like a symbol of what I like least in software. Call it "featuritis": stuffing way too much into a single program.

I'll take a simple e-mail program over one that includes calendar, address book and contacts list any time. Lean programs that do one thing and do it well, that's the ticket.

But one program I've been looking at argues against me. It's called NewzCrawler, and it's designed to do a lot of things, most of which I do every day with separate tools.

It's helpful, for example, to be able to check a news site such as the BBC without actually going to its Web page. With NewzCrawler, I just add a BBC feed to my list of sources.

I've chosen its world news, science, and technology sections. Every day NewzCrawler automatically checks what's new on those pages and shows it to me.

I have several display possibilities, but the easiest is what the software calls a "newspaper," which is actually just a list of headlines and a short summary of each article. NewzCrawler constructs its own pages that list the stories. You click only on the ones you want to see, whereupon the page in question appears in the program's display panel.

All this is handy if you want to track a lot of different sites every day, and I have a large number that I scour for technology news.

By retrieving only a headline for each story, I can quickly determine what to discard, so I can get through many more sites in the same amount of time. It's also easier to spot patterns in the news, stories that are gaining traction in multiple venues.

This kind of syndication, known as RSS (Rich Site Summary) works with any sites that want to use it, so the range of material available is impressive.

Adding a Web log could not be easier, because NewzCrawler connects to several databases of blogs. Click to add a new channel and you receive a huge list of choices. The only problem is making sure you don't add more than you can keep up with.

Suddenly I feel more mellow about programs that do a lot of different things. On the plane, we seem to be moving out of a band of turbulence, and I buy a glass of wine. Now I'm reminded as I recall using NewzCrawler that it also functions as a newsreader, meaning it can access any of the tens of thousands of newsgroups that carry on discussions in a separate corner of the Internet from the Web.

It's nice to be able to update the alt.collecting.pens-pencils newsgroup, where collectors of fountain pens hang out, and to have this done automatically while my other news services are loading. NewzCrawler then goes on to pull in particular Web sites that I check every day, letting me scan them from the same user interface I've used for the rest. All these channels are reached through a panel to the left of the screen, with content displayed on the right.

At $25, NewzCrawler is a top-of-the line program available for evaluation at www.newzcrawler.com. In my new, mellow mood (we are now, thank God, descending), I can think of other things I like about the program, including its Web log publishing tools. But for me, version 1.7 saves me so much time that I've overcome my dislike for featuritis (but let's not get started on Microsoft Office).