Monday, December 12, 2005

GreatNews RSS Reader – One Week and Still Using It…

Last week I blogged about the GreatNews RSS reader. I said was going to give it a try for a bit. Well after one week, I’m still using it, which given my attention spam and tolerance level, says allot.

In the past week I’ve not needed to directly access Bloglines and I’ve found myself saying, “Wow, this is cool” on more than one occasion.

What do I like about GreatNews?

1. It is fast
Loading, reading, newspaper view generation, feed updating, etc. It’s just fast…

2. The Channel/Folder Newspaper views

I subscribe to a good number of feeds. The only way I can manage them is to organize/folder like or related feeds. Bloglines has a cool feature where if you click on a folder, you get all the unread posts from all the feeds in that folder as a single page. This is commonly called a newspaper view…

This suits my post reading/scanning style to a tee.

GreatNews supports this behavior in a couple cool ways.
It supports custom sorting in a given newspaper view. So instead of sorting by feed/by date, you can sort by title or author or date or title.

The different views are also available to help you find one that suits you and your reading style.  

Also I like how the navigation ties into the views.

3. Navigation

I dig how the navigation works. If you’re in a Channel/folder scoped view mode, then when you get to the bottom of the unread feeds and hit the spacebar/scroll the mouse button, you go to the next Channel/folder with unread posts.

If you’re in a feed view, then instead you go the next unread feed…

Meaning you remain at the same scope level as you read through your feeds.

If you want to navigate by select posts, the current list of post titles is easily available for you to view, sort and select.

4. When I leave it running, I don’t know it is running…

When it is running it doesn’t slam my machine, doesn’t suck CPU cycles, memory, etc. For example, right now it’s minimized to my System tray and it’s using just over 2 ½ MB of RAM.

5. Bloglines Sync

Sync’ing with Bloglines is very cool. But what’s also cool is that it is easy to break/detach the sync’ing of a feed with Bloglines.

For example for what ever reason, my SourceForge RSS feeds never seem to update on Bloglines, even though when I check manually there ARE updates. So I make a note to check all of them manually every so often, which pretty much defeats the whole purpose of subscribing to their feeds.

Well GreatNews allows you to stop sync’ing a given feed it Bloglines. It will then act as a normal Reader and get the given feed on its own.

It is as easy as right-click on the feed, clicking on the “Detach from Bloglines” button and now GreatNews handling the feed itself...

Things I don’t like?
1. Not being able to configure the keyboard shortcuts.
This bugs me, but something I can live with.


As you might guess, I’m pretty happy with it. Personally this is now my benchmark for Windows full client RSS Readers.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with all of the above, but what got me to try it and has kept me using it is the ability to install on and run from a thumb drive.

I leave it connected at work, get updates, read some, detach and reconnect at home, get more updates, read some more and everything is always perfectly in sync (because there's nothing to sync)!

Anonymous said...

I like it too, a lot, and agree with you about the positive things about it.

But there are a few more things I don't like:

- I can't organize feeds in an arbitrary order: they are always put alphabetically
- I can't mark posts as UNREAD
- I can't change the fonts

Anonymous said...

Almost forgot: no "minimize on close" thing...

Greg said...

Nice, I didn't realize it would run from a thumb drive. Yeah, that is VERY cool.

BTW, you can mark a post as unread, but you have to look for it. Above the newspaper view, expand the "News List" view (View/News List. Right click on a post and "Mark as Unread".

But I agree that's hard to find and it would be nice to have that functionality in the newspaper view itself (like next to the Label This link, etc).

On the font's, it looks like each newspaper view has it's own CSS in the Media folder... So worse case, you could hack that to change the fonts. But more easily used font/display options would be cool.

LOL, the lack of Minimize on Close gets me all the time too...

Greg said...

The good thing is that most of these issues should hopefully be fairly easy to solve.
(God, I hate it when my users say that... "That should be easy for you to do..." LOL)

The basic infrastructure looks and feels solid. It just needs some tweaking...

While it's not perfect (the day I ship a perfect 1.0 app will be the day I {insert nearly impossible event here}), it's a great 1.0, and given its price it is hard to complain. ;)

Anonymous said...

About the mark as unread thing, yes, I agree, I was so dumb I couldn't find it. But really, why not giving it a menu option and a keyboard shortcut as ctrl-U?

And yes, I also agree about the core: it's a very nice piece of work, and it seems to be growing very well. :)

Anonymous said...

the biggest complain I have is that it uses internet explorer rendering engine... why not go with gecko ??
other than that, it's really good :-)

Anonymous said...

Great Reader, I use it as well. I agree completely on the keyboard nav feature. If you post on the developers site about it, he WILL take notice. Another nice 'feature' of the product is his support.

bliz said...

tim said...
the biggest complain I have is that it uses internet explorer rendering engine... why not go with gecko ??
other than that, it's really good :-)


Hi, would like to let you know that there is a workabout to use the gecko engine.
http://www.curiostudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2587#2587

Have fun!