Yep, RSS readers. It’s slightly unhinged perhaps but it’s better than climbing clock towers with a snipers rifle. A suggestion was thrown across the desk yesterday that I try RSSOwl. It’s Java but uses SWT so we get AA and a decent platform look. And it does look clean and attractive, which is an underrated feature especially in open source software.
The downside is that I’m not cuffed with the UI. It’s the standard catch of a UI designed by programmers. Among other things: you have to double click in the feeds list to open a feed, feeds have to be categorised, each feed opens in a tab and the ‘Go to next unread’ shortcut only works on open tabs. Oh and search only works in the current tab.
Of course you can get around some of these, mostly by using the ‘Aggregate all Feeds’ button which gives you a tab with everything. Of course then everything is in one big jumble…
The thought occurs that maybe I should write one. But then it would just end up in my ‘projects’ directory with all the other half finished pieces of software I’ve written. Oh well. Back to Newsfire.
In other news I stumbled across an XBox with Pirates! in HMV yesterday. This has rekindled my longing for a games machine. And so my current project has become building a games PC (and maybe media/PVR machine) thus putting Windows in it’s rightful place – somewhere where I don’t have to trust data to it :-)
