pwnt.be

I’m so sick of trying to find a decent feed reader. Up until today, I’d used Sage, FeedReader, RSSOwl and SharpReader. While I had decided to stick with SharpReader because it’s pretty lean and straightforward, today, I got rid of it, because it’s also ugly and unintuitive. Luckily, since they all support OPML, I can switch between feed readers pretty easily. So, today, I gave RSS Bandit a try.
My first impression was that it looked more polished—too polished: it randomly blends in with Windows Classic. In light of all my feed reader mishaps, that was the least of my concerns, so I decided to see where it would go. I was pleasantly surprised at how easily I could import my feeds and configure it. Next came the tray notification balloon saying there were new articles. I liked it at first, but, unfortunately, my enthusiasm was short-lived: the same balloon just kept coming over and over until I marked the articles as read, even though I had already looked at them. Anyway, I discovered I could turn off the balloons from the tray icon’s context menu, and decided to settle for it.
Minutes later, my machine started to get sluggish. The task manager revealed RSS Bandit was maxing out CPU usage and consuming hundreds of megs of RAM. At that point, I’d had enough and got rid of it.
Consequently, I needed an alternative. On my seemingly endless quest, I came across GreatNews. Arguably, that’s an even worse name than “RSSOwl”, “RSS Bandit”, or “Bottomfeeder”—no, really, it exists—but, so far, I’m actually rather pleased with it. It reads all my feeds without any trouble, looks pretty nice, and it’s nowhere near being a resource hog. If I were to write my own feed reader, this one would be pretty similar. Since it’s still in beta, I assume the little shortcomings I’ve come across will be fixed in a future release, so I’m definitely going to stick with it. And there was much rejoicing.