Ktn

Newzie is one of the most complete RSS feed readers out there, it has a lot of functionalities that I believe I won’t mention, basically because I don’t use them!

Indeed, it is one of those tools with a lot of things in it that it just got bloated. I will hardly use even the 10% of the functions it provides. I don’t know why but this sounds familiar, with the huge difference that Newzie is free.

I’m using the latest version for a long time, it’s the 0.9.91 Beta. I’m not sure if it uses the .NET framework or not, I couldn’t find anything in their web page, but for sure it uses the IE engine, something I don’t like.

I should say that Newzie is pretty good handling the feeds, even when some have parsing errors in other readers, Newzie parse them correctly. This is something good that really surprises me. I don’t know if the developers actually created an algorithm to detect the wrong things in the feed to fix them or if it was added without having the intention to.

The thing about giving each channel a value, like 1 cent worth, or a buck worth, 20 dollars worth, etc., is nice. And the colors in the listing are good also.

One of my issues with it is that most of the times it forgets when I selected the “Calendar Navigation” for a channel. Another issue is that by default it uses the entire screen and there’s no way to have it maximized but reduced in dimensions, hope you can understand what I mean, I like to always see several windows at a time and Newzie is kind of intrusive.

As I said, one of the things I hate the most is that it uses the IE browser engine, and you may think that’s the worst issue that can happen to someone but not ! There’s a problem with Newzie that is really bad…

If it doesn’t crashes during the first minute after I launched it, it stays consuming 99% of the CPU!!! Yes, pretty pretty bad, I think it doesn’t consumes the 100% just because it can’t.

I can be sure if it crashed in the very first minute if the machine is responsive, if it doesn’t crashes I have to open the Task Manager and end its process.

In the window I see when it crashes I can read the common text when an application crashes in Windows, which is:

Newzie - Information Aggregator has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost.

There’s a link at the end to see more information, and when clicking on it I can see the following:

Error signature
AppName: newzie.exe AppVer: 1.0.0.1 ModName: lpdll.dll
ModVer: 1.0.0.1 Offset: 0000a4e2

Another link appears in this window to see the technical information, but it’s useless for me; and I won’t provide that information to the developers either because some of the contents as hexadecimal values that are in there may be something from the feed of the internal blog site in IBM.

By the way, when clicking in the Close button in the window that notified me that Newzie crashed I can see an Error window containing the following:

Newzie.exe - Application Error
The instruction at “0x7c2821b2″ referenced memory at “0x0000001c”. The memory could not be “read”.
Click on OK to terminate the program

So, I’m stuck. It never works correctly. Surprisingly it uses just a few MB of RAM in comparison to the readers that explicitly mention that the .NET framework is required.

It is using 168 MB of hard disk space for the nearly 24,000 entries it has right now, from 44 channels. And looks like it maintains indexes because, apart that I see an “Indeces” directory, there’s a lot of hard disk read and write when Newzie is starting. Yeah, I know, I probably can configure it to not go and check all of the feeds at startup, but I really need it to check everything at the moment.

I’ll try the “Backup Current Environment” feature and remove it until there’s a new version released. Then I’ll see if the crash or the high CPU usage are gone.