Well, the summer’s here and it’s time for the silly season to start - sorting out software to use which I really should have made a decision about earlier.
Investigating PHP IDEs was the first task, now it’s RSS Readers. I’ve been using Opera 8’s built-in reader, but since “going back to Firefox”:http://peter.mapledesign.co.uk/weblog/archives/opera_lover_concedes_defeat.html it’s been getting annoying to fire up this browser just to read my feeds (another footprint in my memory)
So… stand-alone program time. Rule 1 is that the program must be free. So I’ve been testing:
# “RSSBandit”:http://www.rssbandit.org 1.3.0.29
# “GreatNews”:http://www.curiostudio.com 1.0 Beta (Build 315)
# “Sauce Reader”:http://www.synop.com/Products/SauceReader/ 2.0.1(Beta)
“RSSBandit”:http://www.rssbandit.orgis definitely free; I am unsure about GreatNews, it’s still in beta form and no mention of a price at present.
Rule 2 is that it has to fit in with my use of a RSS reader: I use it as a way to keep and archive articles of interest. Any I don’t want (lots) I delete, so this deleting process needs to be as easy as possible. This means using and to select items.
I like the newspaper display of items, but if this is present and I’m deleting items, I want the display to update, not change to a single-item display.
A lot of problems come about because RSS readers treat items as if they were email, a metaphor I can never understand. A different approach is clearly needed IMO.
h3. Day 1.
“GreatNews”:http://www.curiostudio.comhas the attraction of synching with “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com which allows you to read the RSS feeds whether on the move or at your computer. I love this feature, although I’ve never been ecstatic about the Bloglines interface. Now honestly, why I like it so much I’m not sure as I’ve usually got my laptop with me, but there you go… I guess the biggest advantage is that my blogroll on this website is always up-to-date.
and don’t select multiple items in GreatNews, so you have to delete items
In a way it’s an unfair comparison as “GreatNews”:http://www.curiostudio.comis still in beta before the release of the first version, while the other two programs are mature. However life isn’t fair and I’m testing now 
RSSBandit, like all the other programs, has a cool interface. I’ve done most of my reading in it so far, mainly because I didn’t get round to installing “Sauce Reader”:http://www.synop.com/Products/SauceReader/until later on.
“Sauce Reader”:http://www.synop.com/Products/SauceReader/has a cool “Show in Groups” feature which groups the items by date. It also has an integrated weblog editor (to write a post in) which would be fine if I didn’t care about the HTML produced at the end. The other feature I really liked is the way you can delete items from the newspaper view - hello, anyone else think this is a good idea? This feature alone is putting it strides ahead of the others.
I’ll keep you posted as I progress with using them. If there’s any others you think I should play with, post a comment to this entry and I’ll install them.
1 comment so far ↓
Cool,man, here is some tips about greatnews that I wanna to share with you.
You can configure greatnews to use firefox by option–>usability. Tick box before ‘open rss link in external default browser’.
As in your case, firefox is your default one.
You can also use it as outlook style by ticking view–>news list.
After that, once you click on a special feed, you will see all the news you received are displayed in a pane one by one as every single email item looklike.
The bloglines api only allows user to synchronize with all the unread news. It pretty much works like outlook express synchronizing with hotmail. Once you download all your email, hotmail server will assume you read all your emails. Once you download all the news items from bloglines server, bloglines will assume you read all of them. But Greatnews still can choose to leave all the news items unread in bloglines even after greatnews downloads them all not like netnewswire and feeddemon which mark all as read upon download.
Until bloglines provide a better synchronisation api, greatnews can do nothing about it.
Newsgator offer a real-time synchronisation api. But sadly it’s not free. It’s like hotmail to outlook, you need to pay a subscription fee to use it.
1. It synchronizes with bloglins. Folder hierarchy is synchronized between Bloglines and Greatnews as well. you feel really comfortable to organize your feeds. You know how it sucks for feeddemon to synchronize with bloglines. Cause feeddemon only imports opml from bloglines without Folder hierarchy at all. So it’s a very hard for me to find a specfic feed and to organize those feeds. In all the desktop news clients, Greatnews’s synchronization with bloglines leaves rest news aggregators in dust. It’s like use outlook express to receive hotmail. Once you receive all the news from bloglines server in greatnews, all the news will be flagged read on bloglines online edition.If you love bloglines, you feel at home.
2. It’s extremely small. It only takes 800kb or so to install. You can even install it on a usb flash drive or even a floppy disk. So you take it everywhere to connect to Pc to use it. How cool is that?! It’s like you have yourself own mini newsgator server which can gurantee you won’t read the same news twice.
3. It runs with only a tiny memory and cpu engaged. So you won’t even notice it when it updates news in the background.
Above all it’s free.
Home free at RSS,man!
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