Having fun with RSS

by Volker Weber

When Ray Ozzie posted his first entry in months on his resting weblog yesterday, he made this remark:

as I dramatically increased my effective consumption thanks in particular to Syndirella, SharpReader and .NET.

I have great respect for Ray but I could not help but laugh out loud after this plug for .NET. I have tried a number of RSS aggregators (Haiko has a wonderful comprehensive list). A number of those came out for .NET after a C# implementation was published on MSDN. Both programs that Ray mentioned require this framework. That is why it takes so long to load them.

So what made me chuckle? I was looking at NetNewsWire:

netnewswiretn.jpg

This program runs rings around the .NET aggregators, both in terms of elegance and implementation. But Ray can't use it. :-)

Comments

He could use NewsGator, though, which directly integrates with Outlook. And that one only works in Outlook and also .Net. :-)

Stefan Smalla, 2003-04-24

And I am sure he can even tie a boat anchor to that. :-)

Volker Weber, 2003-04-24

I always hate myself for throwing away my old Mac when I see excellent applications like that.

- Johan

Johan Känngård, 2003-04-24

Would they run on an old Mac? Why not get a new one?

Volker Weber, 2003-04-24

Nope, It would certainly NOT run on an old Power Mac 7100/80! But my interest for Mac´s could have been kept a bit longer if I didn't sell it. When I get a few SEK over, I will perhaps get an iBook though.

Johan Känngård, 2003-04-25

Is there anything out there for WinTel that is similar to NetNewsWire??? I've tried the .Net initiatives but found them slow to startup and lacking funcationality (I want to be able to group my news feeds by category - eg, Domblogs, Tech News etc).

Colin Williams, 2003-04-25

To Colin,

try Sharpreader ( one of the .NET programs ). It is fast, stable and has categories.

Ronny Fenrich, 2003-04-25

@Colin: No I have not. But I did not look at all of them.

NetNewsWire's elegance is hard to describe. You can group feeds and then look at them individually or by group. It will (optionally) display columns for date and author when availabe. When you look at a group of feeds it will display these columns if one of the feeds provides that data, as you can see above. Maybe the best thing is the "Next unread" implementation which jumps from feed to feed when you finished reading one. And you can navigate everything with just the arrow keys if you want.

Volker Weber, 2003-04-25

He should use DominoGator, back to the roots ;-) I like feedreader much more ( performance is better )

Marco Foellmer, 2003-04-25

Old vowe.net archive pages

I explain difficult concepts in simple ways. For free, and for money. Clue procurement and bullshit detection.

vowe

Paypal vowe