Ktn

This RSS/ATOM agrregator has several good things but also a couple of very bad things that I’ll try to mention in this post.

I feel that I have a lot of items to point out about GreatNews that I’m fearing this post will be quite large, hope it isn’t.

In GreatNews I have only 4 channels, with a total of… hard to know in this case, but my guess is that less than 5,000 entries that use 8.43 MB of disk space (according to the newsfeed.db file).

The interface is good, you can add channels easily and group them. In this case I’m able to configure it to show me just one post when selecting a channel in the left pane. Yep, you guessed it, I had to do that because GreatNews was also getting unresponsive for a few seconds when going to a certain feed, it was configured to show 10 items at a time. At first I thought it was using the .NET framework but their download page says it doesn’t need it. It’s strange because when right clicking on links the context menu is the one from IE, and when seeing the properties the window is almost the same as the one in IE. I said almost because I don’t remember them very well, I hardly use it.

Something that is good but that almost all of the readers provide is that when a feed is broken or can’t be reached the name of the channed gets red, so you can know easily which channels are not working at a specific time, and shows you a tooltip about the error, but isn’t helpful at all.

I never tried the “Label This” and “+Del.icio.us” options since I don’t need them so I can’t comment on them. It provides several styles for the reading pane, which us good, but there is not much difference between them.

Something that almost convinces me about it not using .NET is that when idle it uses only 14 MB of RAM, which may be a point in favor of GreatNews. But to be fair this is the RSS reader with the less workload of all.

I would like to see an easy way to discover the number of total, read and unread posts of all the channels, you can see the properties for each channel one by one, but not for all of them at once.

The problem with GreatNews is that, for the feed of the internal blog site in IBM, it shows a lot of duplicate entries and it also shows entries with the wrong title (taken from another post), the wrong author, and it even tries to predict the future!! Yes, indeed, I see a lot of posts supposedly created on April 30th, 2006. As you can imagine, when I’m trying to see the latest posts in the listing pane I’m seeing just garbage posts, or in other words, posts that were in fact created but that shouldn’t be there. Well, also shows duplicated and “mixed” posts.

It’s a shame that this tool can’t handle the feeds correctly, I won’t be able to try it full force until that is fixed. Have to say that the feed where GreatNews is failing so bad is (was for the already reviewed readers) already added to the other feed readers, and this tool is the only one that shows this problems.

The last bad point to mention is that when starting the tool it doesn’t remembers my preference to show the listing pane by default. I have to go to “View” -> “News list” over and over again.

I’m using the Build 1.0.0.364 of the 1.0 Beta. Time to uninstall it.