Slashdot Mirror

It looks ok. If you're on windows, though, you should try RSS Bandit - An excellent open source .NET feed reader!

huh? you can build open source software with Visual Studio if you want. No one's stopping you from doing that. The issue at hand is that a lot of people ask "can I use the Express SKUs to build software for sale?" I'm not trying to spin anything.

Such as Sharpreader and RSSBandit. See Wikipedia's News aggregator entry for a lot of good ones.

To-do lists. These are mostly implemented now and are mentioned in the article. They are basically reminders without the cumbersome Outlook interface. "Remind me in 20 minutes to call my friend," you type to the proxy, and it dutifully does so. No more setting up calendar appointments for simple things.

I really like OneNote for TODO lists. Is IMSmarter better than that? The one thing OneNote doesn't do is notifications (or, I haven't figured out how to do that, anyway), but I don't need to be notified. I wrote the stuff in my TODO list, I know I need to do it. The list just acts as a reminder of all the things that need to be done.

Logging (and yes, for the paranoid out there, you can turn this off.) This is actually pretty useful as the logs are stored on a central server. I can't tell you how many times I've logged into my PC from home just to dig through chat logs; now I don't have to.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't think I've ever had an IM conversation where I found myself going back through the logs at some later point. To me, IM is like a face-to-face conversation. If I need to take away something important, I'll write it down (in OneNote :). If I don't, the conversation happens and then vanishes into the ether.

Website updates. This is the one I've been bugging David about. The service will automatically notify your friends when you update your personal website. I can't wait to use this one for my blog.

My friends would kill me if I sent them all notifications whenever I update my web site. Similarly, I would kill them if they did that to me. Push models suck. If you want your friends to know when you've updated your website, tell them to get an RSS reader, and publish your site changes in an RSS feed. That way, the friends that care about your update can find out about it, and those that don't, won't. And they won't be bothered in the middle of an important meeting with a note that you just updated your personal website.

Fedex/UPS tracking. Notifies you when a package you've shipped has arrived, for instance.

For those times when the doorbell just isn't enough, eh? Sure, if you're away from home when the delivery happens, the doorbell won't be much use. On the other hand, if you're away from home when the delivery happens, why do you need to be notified the moment it shows up? If you're doing the shipping, UPS and FedEx both allow you to receive tracking notifications via email, so why not use that?

Knowing how motivated David is in this venture, I know we'll see great things from IMSmarter. It still needs maturation -- right now, the platform is there to build on, but not too many implementations have been built. He needs beta testers, and beta testing is pretty simple (you just set up a proxy on your IM client and sign up through their website.) Check it out and mark this one down as "one to watch."

I'm sure David is a smart guy, but this looks like it might find a niche market at best. This is going to be one of those things that you read about on Slashdot, say to yourself, "That's kinda neat, if only it did/didn't do this/that/the other," maybe you try it out once or twice, and then you completely forget about it a week later. It just doesn't seem like it offers anything new that you can't get elsewhere, in an unattractive package (I use IM for IM; my day does not center around my IM client) with an unattractive business model (this is going to collect a lot of personally identifiable information, and that's not something I would trust to an ad-supported company -- it's too easy to decide that you have a real goldmine of user information at your fingertips and start selling it off

RSS Bandit (Windows)
Syndigator (X)

There is also a rss thunderbird extension Formzilla but you have to be using a version of thunderbird build with the xmlextras extension... it is all described in the post.

On Windows I use RSS Bandit. Haven't found a non-sucky one for *nix, although I haven't looked all that hard. On OS X I use NetNewsWire, which while not great, does the job.

RSS Bandit is good, I switched to it from SharpReader some time ago and never went back.

but I can give my thumbs up towards Liferea on Linux. Straw is also good if for some reason Liferea isn't to your liking.

I found a nice Windows reader called rssbandit that I setup for a few people while doing Windows installs recently. They seemed to like it.

I have no experience with OS/X, so I can't put a vote towards anything there. The Linux apps are gtk based and the Windows app is a dotNet programmed app.

Try RSS Bandit. It's based on an MSDN article, Building a Desktop News Aggregator, that discusses how to build an RSS aggregator with C# and .NET.