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 This is a much better way to track news in KDE than the somewhat outdated news ticker."

Comments

Why is everything getting an aggregator?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean... really. My browser, my email client, now desktops... sheesh... How long until we have Solitaire with RSS support?

Re:Why is everything getting an aggregator?

[0racle]

Are you really complaining that you have a choice to use a RSS client where ever it works best for you?

Alright alright

[Anonymous Coward]

Those of you who are going to ignore the article 'kontent' and make wise-'kracks' line up over here.

Re:Alright alright

[paranode]

gnot me!

If we run that through our filter just one more time: "knot me!"

Re:Alright alright

[peter_gzowski]

I'm pretty fukking tired of hitting k and then tab in my shell, and having 8 pages of apps kome up.

Signs of the apocalypse

[Impeesa]

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...

Used this three weeks.. it's good

[Werrismys]

I subscribed security issue related sites, like F-Secure for WinCrap(tm), cert.fi... hell, even Slashdot has RSS feed ;-)

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).

News tickers have their place

[saddino]

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.

Ticker is best for me

[m50d]

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

Outdated newsticker??

[SkjeggApe]

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..

wow that's almost as convenient

[dBeau]

as pushing the RSS feeds into inn and reading them with gnus.

Already using this in MacOS X

[larkost]

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.

This is nothing new

[DJStealth]

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').

Oh the humanity!

[erikharrison]

aKregator? They put a "K" in aggregator?

Just stop. Just - just stop. Please.

stop!

[PerlDudeXL]

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.

Tickers are bad UI

[ruzel]

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.