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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 This is a much better way to track news in KDE than the somewhat outdated news ticker."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 mean... really. My browser, my email client, now desktops... sheesh... How long until we have Solitaire with RSS support?
Those of you who are going to ignore the article 'kontent' and make wise-'kracks' line up over here.
We seem to have had a lot of these around here recently, and I'll be damned if a KDE utility that doesn't start with "K" isn't the most frightening one yet. Okay, it's the second letter, but still...
Works like a charm. It's just that KDE's tight monopolistic ingegration with Konqueror gets in the way.
Try as I will, I cannot tie Firefox as tightly to KDE as I'd like. Now I end up using lightweight Konqueror for some stuff and Firefox for surfing (familiarity over speed, or something).
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
I was constantly staring at the news feeds as they scrolled by and re-reading the same headlines over and over.
This is really a criticism of application design and not the model per se. If the KDE applet doesn't allow you to "see each item once" then that is probably a good feature suggestion.
As the developer of an RSS ticker (Tickershock, for Mac OS X) I find that the happiest users are those who aren't interested in peering at news headlines all day, but rather enjoy the randomness of "catching a good story" every now and then.
Tickers aren't for eveyone (but neither are email-style aggregators) so if the tickers on CNN/MSNBC/FoxNews/etc. drive you crazy, you're probably right to steer clear of them on your desktop.
With this new move they are positioning themselves to eliminate Gnome and all G-related apps! Ingenious!
They'll probably just name it something silly with a "G", like "aggregator" or someth... um... oh.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I find I can read the ticker "subconsciously" as it were. I notice anything interesting without having to actually look at it, so I just get the news with no extra effort. Plus it's built into my taskbar, so takes up zero screen real estate. I'm sticking with the ticker
I am trolling
Well, of course it's outdated!! If they'd only called it KNewstiKker right off the bat, we wouldn't need this new fancy app..
I am sure it will end up not having corner alerts just like every other feed reader in existance. On my windows boxes I used to use this app called SharpReader it was a okay app, but the one feature that it had that I love was corner popups. Every time a new article came in a little box came up telling you the feed title and article title. You could then decide if you wanted to read it, if you did you could click on the title and it would bring up the article. I now find my self in linux more than ever and I have to use straw. The only thing straw does is give me a little sys-tray icon it doesnt tell me the name at all so I have to bring it up click on the bolded feed and then make a judgement call. Thunderbird doesnt have this feature also, infact thunderbird is even worse it doesnt even give you a sys-tray icon! (bug: 261841). So, if akregator has corner popups I will love it forever... but if it doesnt I continue using straw :(
I'm using the aKregator in beta 1 of KDE 3.4 right now. Current version is beta 8, and it is still not good. The one I used untill yesterday (beta 6) had the annoyance that it would stay in the background gobbeling cpu even after selecting quit and it dissapeared from the systray. Beta 8 fixed that, but now clicking the systray icon doesn't work all the time. It says x number of new posts, I click, and absolutely nothing happens. Click-click-click? No. Wait five minutes, and it works again. I suspect it happens when it goes through the list of feeds, but it is damn annoying, and was not in beta 6. Still better than Liferea and Imendio Blam, though.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
as pushing the RSS feeds into inn and reading them with gnus.
...so much code, so little time...
dBeau
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.
I heard that KDE 3.4's aKregator incorrectly performs web searches using Koogle.
For more information, click here.
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').
aKregator? They put a "K" in aggregator?
Just stop. Just - just stop. Please.
please stop to import more and more third-party kde apps into official kde packages.
furthermore, stop to keep dupe apps:
- Noatun / Kaboodle
- KPaint / KolourPaint
almost the same GUI and they serve the same purpose. ignoring the little differences now.
I don't use KDE as my main desktop, but I have KDE installed because I use one or two apps
and dupe apps are just useless. remove one of them and stick to the most promising.
And you dont need KDE!
Liferea
Straw
Blam
Akgregator uses KNotify, so it has the exact same notifications as every other KDE app under the sun.
Namely, it can and will do any combination of:
- Log the event to a file
- Play a sound
- Flash the taskbar entry
- Show a corner popup next to the system tray for 2-3 seconds
- Pop-up an alert-type dialog that grabs attention
- Execute any program or script you see fit to give it
I make it a point to never use software with the phrase GATOR in it.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll wipe out the species.
Not to take this discussion too seriously, I find that tickers are one of those classic examples of where design of a real object was taken literally onto the computer screen. Generally speaking, this is ALWAYS a bad idea. Calendars have pages. Computer screens do not. A calendar on a computer should just show all the days in a scroll or some other fashion where the user doesn't have to click back and forth between months to see things.
In the same respect, tickers exist because of big LED boards. You didn't have any interactivity and no choice but to scroll items by. Ditto for TV. With interactivity there's just no reason to scroll things by the user -- at least not without giving them some control -- like a rewind in the event they miss something. There are just too many other ways to lay out information in a program to ever justify the use of a ticker as a UI. It is restricting the user to a form factor that simply doesn't exist in software.
I know the mono project is working on one.
A dashboard app or ticker with RSS support would be cool or a customable sidebar or background.
I wonder how hard it would be to write one? I am a little envious of the macosx crowd and WindowsBlinds users.
Perhaps a todo list that could sync into a pda in teh dashboard app would be cool too.
http://saveie6.com/
K-Jokes in three, two, ...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Actually I do, it works wonderfuly on the demo machine at work - people love it.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I'm running Sarge with KDE from unstable and I've never seen your problem.
> Some k packages (kde) are 3.3.3-x, some are 3.3.2-x, and a few are 3.3.4-x
[...]
> Why did some packages of kde 3.3.4 make it into sarge
The most recent version of KDE is 3.3.2!
Could it be that you misread the version number? My kdelibs version is 3.3.1-4, for example. 3.3.3-x and 3.3.4-x should not exist. Do you have any non-standard servers in your sources.list, especially any questionable ones?
(Note that qt-3.3.3-x would be ok, that's a completely separate thing.)
> Any way of removing the google toolbar?
Sure. That can be done under Settings -> Configure Toolbars.
BTW: I find the gg: shortcut much more convenient than a bookmark. Type gg:java into konqi's location bar to google for java, for example.
Let me add:
p ://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/
These page confirm it:
http://packages.debian.org/testing/kde/
htt
Not even 3.3.2 exists in either testing or unstable, let alone 3.3.3 or 3.3.4. So, how can you have that package versions?
There is not a -visible, i.e. positively moderated- comment here on akregator which I find unbelievable. They were saying that Slashdot is biased against KDE and now I see it is true!
Akregator is a very well functioning RSS reader which works great (especially with its kontact-konqueror integration). It is what I have been waiting for in the last couple of months: a decent linux rss aggregator/reader.
To those bitching about K in its name and why they don't need rss newsreader: open your eyes and appreciate a good product for what it is!