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RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable
Thoro writes "There is an unusual interview with the authors of the five major RSS clients for OS X: NetNewsWire, NewsFire, NewsMac, PulpFiction and Shrook.
Safari RSS, Apple, the hype around RSS and the role of the news aggregator in the future are discussed. It's also hinted that the performance problems of RSS may be overblown.
It is a breath of fresh air to see so many competitors come together to talk civily and not to better gang up on another."
It seems like they're tons out there, why do people keep making more?
Is there a reader that is flexible enough to allow users to make a pseudo web site (ie serving locally) with those aggregating syndicated content?
Imagine the possibility to design/allocate different news on diferent section of a web page, with different links, and everybody will get an instant GoogleNews with fully customised content.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
That would assume one of two things.
1. posters to slashdot actually possess grammer skills
2. the mods actually care about readability of their news
PC Hardware (teir one) vendors spend weeks with FUD about the other products. (IE Tommy Boy and "But what if the Guarantee Fairy's a crazy glue sniffer? Next thing you know there's change missing from your dresser and your daughter's knocked up. I've seen it a hundred times.")
Windows does the same thing from a development standpoint (DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run) and to some extent the semi-zealotry of the OSS community (to parapharase Mike Myers 'If it's not GPL it's CRAP!' and all the associated 'KDE is l33t gnome is proprietary' type things.
Just my $0.02
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Apple is going to introduce Safari RSS with Mac OS X 10.4.
I think Apple should tied RSS reader with Mail.app, not the browser. What you think about that?
Am I the only one who doesn't get the point of RSS? It seems to be providing periodic updates in a concise format. Can't you do that by setting things up to send items by email every time there's a new item posted? Or even by UseNet to a moderated group? What does RSS do that's new?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
RSS is FOD (feed on demand), so yo don't get what you didn't ask for, and you can easily filter/remove undesired RSS feed.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
That's "grammar".
Point for me!
I'm finding that each RSS reader I see brings a feature or two I'd like, but none of them do everything right.
-Thunderbird does really well, but the keyboadr shortcuts don't drop down to the view window...want to see the next page? Hit space, see the next RSS feed item. (D'oh!)
-Another makes you click the item, then click the preview, when all you really want on some sites is to go from the item to the fill-monty (like Slashdot, for example)
-One updates Every Fifteen Minutes...ensuring you'll never get work done. Finish a pile of Rss feeds, Alt-tab over to your application, and it insistently bounces on the app bar telling you you've got more to read!
It's like all of the RSS programmers didn't have any UI background and have to learn all the useability stuff we figgured out in Web Browsers....and Word Processors, and OS's...
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I wanted to comment on the claims that RSS performance problems may be "overblown", but all I get is 503 errors!
Must be all those darn RSS users trying to get their slashdot feed on the hour.
All well and good that the Mac developers can make a standard, but what happens when Microsoft comes out with MSRSS or RSSnet that is completely proprietary?
-Louie
I'd also like to see a decent ticker with a reasonable interface. Something not too intrusive that will roll selected headlines across the menubar or somewhere else once in a while, not constantly. I looked at a screensaver that did RSS but it did way too much work and crashed a bunch. I just want to occasionally know when there is a new headline on certain RSS feeds.
Of course, there are tons of other potential RSS applications out there; reading slashdot headlines using different interfaces is only the tip of the iceberg. Being able to integrate RSS and similarly updated information into other applications could be very useful.
Where's SlashDock in the list? http://homepage.mac.com/stas/slashdock.html
This is what I use to constantly check SlashDot for new stories. It's probably the best I've seen, is contantly updated and is FREE! (Donations accepted.)
I have no connection other than liking and using SlashDock.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
Those who forget the past are doomed
The only thing RSS I'm actually using and somewhat "get" is iPodder for podcasts. Minimalist and klunky, though. I wish it would notify me when a new podcast has been downloaded. As it is I have to check iTunes manually to see if there's anything new. Better still it should check to see if your iPod is connected, and if it is, tell iTunes to sync it. Then it really would be loading your iPod for you.
--- What?
Theoretically, it is easy to write a RSS reader. For example you can create a RSS reader for your blog in PHP that will pull the latest headlines from your friends' blogs so that y'all can link back and forth to each other. I say theoretically because you have RSS 0.92, RSS/RDF 1.0 and RSS 2.0. That's why Atom came into being, a bunch of guys finally wanted a standard XML grammar that wouldn't change with the latest whims of its maintainers and users.
There really is nothing stopping you from writing plugins for MovableType or another blog package that supports plugins, that would allow you to send email or post to usenet. The question is... why would you want to do that as an alternative to RSS rather than maybe a compliment? Your automatically generated messages would probably just got shot down by a spam filter.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Not that I'm an RSS fanatic, but I've heard of exactly one of these (NetNewsWire), and everyone I know on OS X uses SlashDock, so this strikes me as uninformed. And not mentioning SlashDock on Slashdot, of all things...
sig != null
Why not just use a web interface so that you don't have a Mac or PC version. I've been playing with Pluck's ( http://www.pluck.com ) web interface which I like. Other vendors also have web interfaces.
The idea of RSS is great, but how is different from the late 90's idea of pushing content to the desktop, such as Microsoft's Active Desktop?
:
2 issues posed
1) Automated RSS agents might update too often, thus creating unnecessary network traffic.
2) The user might need to access the absolutely latest headlines, and the RSS agent might be displaying a cached copy. Then when the user access the original site's frontpage, the original intent of RSS is defeated.
I'm a huge fan of RSS (esp My Yahoo portal's implementation), but the problems need to be addressed.
Ok, I'll put it this way:
I get a lot of mail generated by CVS commits. A *lot* of mail.
Now, I can either read that mail or I can ignore it. Regardless of the effect, it appears in my mailbox, and I have to write several filters to keep it from obscuring my mother's wonderful chain letters telling me how much she loves me.
90% of the time, I don't care what's in that diff, where it's applied, or anything.
But I spent a good deal of time writing a small script to generate those emails. Sounds like something pretty counter-productive, especially when I can use the CVS tools or something like cvsweb to look at those diffs, right? Not really. As I'm sure you know, having the ability to use my mail client's search tool to scan through those makes it easy.
Enter cvs2rss. Instead of generating emails that get pushed to my mailbox every commit, it generates a RSS file on the server, which points to the cvsweb stuff. What does this mean?
Instead of getting 40 emails a day and ignoring 39 of them, I configure my reader to scan the rss file once a day. It doesn't interfere with my mail checking, nothing else, as a matter of fact. And when I *do* want to check out something, I can go to cvsweb, where I can do a lot more than just stare at the diff - which is nice if I want to annotate. And our mail administrator is happy because I don't have an IMAP box crammed with every patch since the inception of the project.
If you want to take this further, imagine slashdot's email load, which pushes emails when stories come out. Now, I may not care about the latest story, nor do I want to read slashdot as often as they send out emails. So I configure my RSS reader to check slashdot every 4 hours. Result? The only time I visit slashdot now is to (like right now), reply to comments that have been made to mine. And it's like this for every site that uses RSS. BBC, Slashdot. CSMonitor, they all have the same interface, my RSS reader NewsFire, which is much better suited to giving me a pile of links and descriptions than my email client is.