Tech 24 Jun 2005 12:20 pm
Desktop RSS readers
Is it just me, or is the available crop of desktop RSS readers really, really disappointing, with very few exceptions? After deciding to leave Bloglines I’ve tried quite a few of them, free or not, and almost every single one has at least one thing that makes it basically unusable, in my opinion. Let’s look at a few of them, leading to my current choice of reader.
Thunderbird: it was the obvious choice, being already installed in my machine and being a reasonably good e-mail client. However, the key problem with it is simple: if, by accident, you try to delete an old post by hitting the Delete key and you have the feed (and not the post) selected, it gleefully deletes the feed and removes the subscription. That’s different from what happens if you do the same thing to an e-mail folder; there’s a confirmation dialog for that. If you then type Ctrl-Z to undo the deletion, it recreates the folder but does not recreate the subscription properly. After doing that a few times by accident, I decided I couldn’t keep subscribing to the same feeds over and over. Also, it has no built-in way to deal with removing old posts automatically.
FeedDemon: (not free, I used the free trial version) very decent software, pretty interface, very usable. However, its interface has a peculiar quirk: not all feeds can be visible at all times in the feed list. Only one group of feeds (or channels, as it calls it) is visible at a time. This wouldn’t be so bad in itself, but the feeds that are not visible are also not being updated. They will be updated only when displayed. This is, in my not-so-humble opinion, idiotic, specially if you subscribe to frequently updated feeds. You will miss posts in those. I can’t imagine why the software works like that, and I couldn’t find a way to configure it not to do that.
Sharp Reader: Mortal sin: if you click on the content of a post, the space bar stops working to navigate between posts. Also, it kept showing repeated copies of old posts in a few feeds, for no reason I could discern. One other annoying thing is that all my feeds were created in a folder called “Imported from export.xml”, and there’s no way to take them out of there. And, very frequently, when right-clicking on a feed it would barf with an exception like “ContextMenu cannot be shown on an invisible control”. The only way to make it stop happening is to close the reader (exit or minimize to tray) and reopen it.
RSS Bandit: for a while, I thought this was “the one”. It isn’t. My main issue with it is an unbelievable bug: it mixes up feeds. Posts from one feed show up in another. Over and over again. This happens most often with FeedBurner feeds, but not only with them. The first time, you think “that’s weird”. After a few days, you can’t take it anymore. Also, it seems to stop updating feeds if it finds an error; and boy, does it find errors! Connection problems, parsing errors… they may well be legitimate problems, but any reader has to be more accepting of feed problems than that. Other than that, and the habit of taking CPU usage to 100% for long periods while updating feeds, I don’t really have anything to complain about; it is a decent reader with a few annoying bugs which, if fixed, will make it a good product.
Omea Reader: from JetBrains, the makers of Intellij IDEA, this is my selected reader for the moment. But get the 2.0 beta version, and not the latest “stable” version! The 1.0 version has a very strange bug that messes up with the tree-list of feeds when you navigate between posts using the space bar. To their credit, I reported the bug to them and was told to use the beta, which fixes it beautifully. They have also a Pro version, not free, which I haven’t tested. I have nothing to complain about this piece of software; it is definitely the best one I’ve tried. It also reads Usenet news, which I realize is something not many people still do, but for me it’s useful.
Of course, other recommendations would be welcome, as long as it’s not for any software that works as an add-on to Outlook…
on 24 Jun 2005 at 11:59 pm 1.Dare Obasanjo said …
We’ve heard the complaints about feeds being mixed up in RSS Bandit and are tracking down the problem. Can you tell me which feeds you were having problems with?
on 25 Jun 2005 at 8:46 am 2.Randy Charles Morin said …
Download Juice and tell me what you think. It’s got a different UI. It doesn’t basket the feeds. You just click Read|Read|Read|Read…
http://www.kbcafe.com/juice/download.html
on 26 Jun 2005 at 3:00 am 3.Serge Baltic said …
Thank-you for the good words about Omea!
By the way, the Release Candidate 1 for the new version will be out just in a few days. Should you notice any problems in Omea, it’s a good time to report them!
The main aspect in which Omea Pro differs from Omea Reader is email support — and also IM conversations, indexing of local files, working with contacts & tasks, etc — see http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/compare.html for the complete list.
on 06 Jul 2005 at 5:33 am 4.deewoo said …
Why not try Bloglines.Bloglines is much better than newsgator. You can synchronize bloglines with blogbot for outlook. Folder hierarchy is synchronized between Outlook and Online via blogbot. It’s much better than newsgator between outlook and online.
If you like desktop news client, You can use Greatnews to synchronize bloglines like newsgator using feeddemon. Good news is Greatnews is a wonderful free software but feeddemon isn’t.Folder hierarchy is synchronized between Bloglines and Greatnews. Feeddemon doesn’t synchronize Folder hierarchy between newsgator online and itself. Greatnews can be found at :http://www.curiostudio.com/
If you like newsgator for outlook, don’t worry, blogbot does the same and better job for outlook. blogbot can be found at http://www.blogbot.com/out/.