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RSSOwl 1.2 Released
Benjamin Pasero over at RSSOwl.org wrote to tell us that they have released version 1.2 for their RSS/RDF/Atom newsfeed viewer. It looks like a lot of work has gone into this version. Some of the new features are; a fully customizable toolbar with new elements like 'History', new search scopes allow for more detailed searches, a new 'Linked Mode' to update selection in your favorites automatically, support for Atom 1.0 format, and quite a few others.
This is an honest question and not an attempt to troll or bait. (Posted AC because I fear gettting moded to hell)
What can an RSS/Atom reader do for me?
I have no problem browsing my favorite sites once or twice a day, and enjoy doing so. What am I missing out on?
Great software. Pity it doesn't use Swing. But wait maybe it is the reason why it is great software.
Million Dollar Screenshot
"Those who do not understand USENET are doomed to reinvent it, poorly"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I agree with your points, but would also add that an aggregator also gives you some things that a web browser doesn't.
For one, you can save locally-cached copies of posts. Yes, a web browser also has a cache, but you can't typically have both easy and fine-grained control of the content you keep or throw away. Some sites that have feeds have mediocre connectivity (and feeds were originally promoted partly as a bandwidth saver--you don't download as much content at once). Some authors have a nasty habit of deleting the best content. By archiving it in an aggregator, you can save the best stuff.
Aggregators also let you search over all relevant feeds and only those feeds. No more dealing with separate search engines, with their separate "advanced search" syntax (or, worse, very basic or non-existent searches).
Finally, an aggregator lets you apply filters so that the best, most relevant content sees your eyes & bad/spammy content doesn't. I keep my feeds in Thunderbird, and treat some blogs as email--I apply Bayesian filters to particularly noise-filled feeds (such as comment feeds), and sort content topically. Some aggregators eliminate or group related posts that come from different feeds. Some let you push these posts (which have the most "buzz") to the top, so you don't miss it.
Pardon my French, but who the fuck cares? Why do I need to read about RSSOwl on Slashdot? I can understand reading about a new release of KDE or Gnome or the kernel or something, but a NEWS reader?
Yawn.
I've just recently discovered bloglines after using firefox & sage to keep up with my many RSS feeds.
Can anyone enlighten me as to if (and if so why) one should be using this instead of bloglines? This is not bashing, I'm just interested into what people use and why.
The problems i've had with a lot of rss readers is that they're SLOW because they use an xml database (opml file) the reader i use uses sql-lite or someother sql database for it's storage and while that causes problems when you shutdown the process without exiting properly it makes for an extermely fast rss reader.
To answer my own question, I guess privacy issues could play a role here. If I am subscribing to controversial feeds, I might not want some big corporation to know about that. Still, I think I'd rather run some sort of server-based system on my own box than run this application. Does anyone know if such a system exists?
With RSSOwl, I can watch for software releases on Freshmeat, so no one will ever, ever again need to post software release announcements to Slashdot!
Thanks, RSSOwl!
RSS is nice, but this software product is not really anything special or unique.
Does anyone else find the icon quite similar to another popular icon?