RSS Readers

17 May

I continue to be amazed at how few *good* free, standalone, RSS readers there are out there that don’t rely on the .NET framework being installed. And when I say good I mean reliable, allows proxy authentication, OPML export/import support and some sort of visual notification. That’s it. Not much.

On my home machine (Mac) I use PulpFiction. It meets all of my basic requirements and looks good but I don’t use it much to have formed a major opinion (though I have noticed a few small irritations).

At work I use FeedReader. And this is the product that sparked this rant. I’ve been using FeedReader for a year or two (with a break when I came to my current workplace and had to wait until it supported proxy authentication). I’ve had version 2.7 installed on my NT machine since it was released. It has its bugs and minor flaws but it was mostly ok. My biggest gripe was having to zap the configuration ini file and reinstall the app if my proxy password changed.

Anyway, I discovered today that a version 2.10 was recently released so I promptly installed it. Big Mistake! I think it took about 10 steps back from version 2.7 – links within articles weren’t working, images weren’t displaying, it crashed numerous times. I know it’s an Open Source product, etc., etc., but really it doesn’t take much to test it on a couple of machines! The problems are not unique to me, its Sourceforge website has all of the problems that I encountered logged already. It wasn’t even a RC! So, now I’ve reverted back to (semi-) reliable 2.7.

Surely there’s got to be one good, free reader out there! How hard can it be? If you know of a better reader I’d be happy to hear about it!