News Aggregators

I finally downloaded and installed NetNewsWire Lite on my laptop. Prior to today, I was only using it at work, as I haven’t had a full day at home to need it, but I do today. I’d like to note some recommendations for Brent, the author, that I’ll be emailing him, so I figured I’d blog them as well (in no particlar order):

• Have a way to publish my ‘subscriptions’ to a server somewhere, so that when you install the software on a new machine, you can click one button, maybe ‘grab subscriptions’ and it’ll go to the server, find your file/list, and download it, and update your list… including any groups you’ve got, anything (maybe this is a feature for the paid version, maybe not)
• Quit installing any feed that doesn’t provide at least some descriptive text in their RDF feed as default (like MacCentral, or MacNN)
• When I unsubscribe from a feed, that feed should disappear from the two right content windows, as it is now, that feed stays live, while your selection moves down… sort of confusing, and not accurate.
• When I drag a ‘site’ to a group, it automatically drops that group open, which isn’t what I’d prefer, and then it puts that dragged site at the top of the list… I’d like it to go to the bottom, like the way bookmarks default to the bottom of a folder/group in Mozilla and/or IE. Use the default behavior of other apps unless you really have a great reason not to.
• Allow users to drag an entire group from the ‘sites drawer’ to their subscribed to list.
• Allow me to turn off the ‘verification’ of the addition of a RSS Feed when I drag and drop it into my list of subscribed sites. This should be a prefernce setting, as some users might like this behavior.
• When a user addds a new feed, automatically upgrade it to the central server, so that you can integrate it back into the products ‘sites drawer’ as you release new upgrades (this should probably a preference, so that privacy concerned users have the option of participating).
• Let me break apart the ‘three window panes’ so that I only have to display that which I want to display. I’m thinking it’d be nice to just leave the display (bottom right) window open all the time, in the back ground, so that I can go read everything, when I have time, and at other times, I’d just like to have a list of the sites I’m subscribed to open, so that I can glance quickly at the list of sites, and the number of headlines they have that are new.

So far, thats about it. I’m sure that as fast as Brent is releasing updates to this beta software, I’ll decide I want more… and I’ll try to blog it here. As a side note, there are plenty of News Aggregators for Windows, and I’d recommend you try them out sometime… they’re quite useful. If you’re on a Mac, NetNewsWire is the best, if not only, one out there.

[later]Pineapple seems to be another Mac OS X news reader… downloading now, will report back.