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RSS/RDF/Atom Aggregation in KDE 3.4
comforteagle writes "With KDE 3.4 beta just announced a few days ago spokesman George Staikos has written about the new RSS/RDF/Atom Aggregator included in the new release, aKregator, in his column KDE: From the Source. 'In contrast to a news ticker style of RSS application, you don't need to constantly look at aKregator to see if there is new news. I have found that with news tickers such as the applet in KDE, I was constantly staring at the news feeds as they scrolled by and re-reading the same headlines over and over. With aKregator, I find I never look at old news as headlines that are read are conveniently grayed out and pushed down the list.' This is a much better way to track news in KDE than the somewhat outdated news ticker."
I have been using this sort for a system for a while now on MacOS X. I alternate between using NetNewsWire Lite and the built-in RSS checking in OmniWeb. To take the NetNewsWire Lite example:
I setup the feeds I want to view in NNWL and then leave the application running, but either with the main window closed, or with the application hidden. Every hour it checks my feeds and then puts a badge on its dock icon with the number of changed items. I just right-click (multi-button mouse) on the dock icon and select the items I want to view (and mark-all-read the rest) and they pop up as tabs in my browser-of-choice (OmniWeb in my case).
Very simple, very quick, and without having anything in the way when I don't want it.
The RSS plugin for Trillian has been doing this for years. It only pops something up when there's a new piece of news (and appears as a different colour in the list for the first minute of it being 'new').
In fairness KDE is starting to drop the K convention being used for everything. Bear in mind there is still gedit and some g-conventions still in Gnome too. Just some examples are:
amaroK (a K at the END not beginning)
Scribus
Gwenview
DigiKam