When will the ONE come …
I generally stick to the software I get used to. For me the difficulty is the initial choice and not the fending off the claims of other products (free or otherwise) once a choice is made. I still use notepad as my primary text editing tool and shifted from IE to Firefox or Outlook to Thunderbird only when I started working on multiple environments after shifting to PI. Though the working on multiple environments did not continue too long I had become besotted with both. However tragically for me I have just spent an hour installing yet another feed reader for reading my feed subscriptions, shifting from the RSS reader which comes with Thunderbird to Omea Reader. Ironically I was in the meanwhile listening to the Talkcrunch’s latest episode on the battle of online feed readers.
I have a some requirements from any such application:
- Speed. Once I click on a post item I really do not want to wait till it loads. Any feed reader is given enough idle time by me to use for downloading updates. Thunderbird failed on this count, it took like ages to get feeds and worst of it all it got it all in real time. Almost all online feed readers fail on this count as well. Plus opening a web page and login in is too much work to read a feed. Regardless of what they claim they do not really give a good enough user experience to overcome this inertia.
- Priority of posts. I want to priotize feeds so that updates to those appear at the top of the list if unread. None of the feed readers I have used has this yet. Does not look like a great deal to develop. Also over a period of time, my feed reader seems to acculumate a list of quasi interesting feeds that i have stupidly added. Adding some minimal intelligence to these readers to identify what I would be interested in currently is needed.
- Auto cleaning of posts. I really do not want to keep Slashdot posts of last week, while I do want to keep the Techcrunch posts or Paul Grahm essays for future reference.
- Good HTML rendering. The guys who publish the blogs really put in some effort towards making their posts more readable for the users. The feed reader has no business of taking away this luxury from me.
- Low CPU usage. I hated my first reader SharpReader for this reason. It used loads of CPU in the days when computing power for me was at a premium. And I hate freewheelers.
- Ability to search and label important posts. Search through the existing posts in the reader as well as allow me to label (or tag) a particular post as being important or as pertaining to a certain topic. This information should not be lost even if the original post is deleted for reason.
With Vista coming in with an inbuilt framework for syndication with RSS and Atom, I believe that these demands are not unreasonable. But how long will the wait continue?
Technorati Tags: computers, feed readers
