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.