Ktn

Now is the turn of SharpReader. I’ll mention up front that I’m using what appears to be the latest version (0.9.6.0) as of today and that it wasn’t put into the pressures as the ones in which RSS Bandit was.

SharpReader is simple, I’m not sure if it was created with a minimalist goal in mind or not since I’m not a fan of minimalism and actually I don’t know what defines minimalism.

I like the option to see the “Feed Properties” at the bottom of the left pane, I have this little section active because I’m only subscribed to 5 feeds, 2 of them are for testing purposes and another one just have 5 posts, it’s holding only 5,337 entries that use 10.9 MB of disk space.

It would be good if SharpReader can provide a little button or icon at the bottom of the left pane to be able to toggle on or off the “Feed Properties” section, to avoid having to go to “Tools” -> “Feed Properties”, I’m mentioning this because in the case I’m subscribed to the 102 feeds as in RSS Bandit I may have the need to having a look to most feeds as possible in the left pane but quickly take a look to the properties of a given feed.

Another thing that I liked but doesn’t work so well is the fact that by default it shows you as additional entries under a given post the thread of entries for it and sometimes the links to references to web pages or images contained in the post, somehow handy, but needs to be polished.

A bad point, there’s no way to create categories or folders of feeds. Yep, I cannot group the feeds so that I can go to the ones I’m more interested at the moment, this kept me from adding the whole list of subscriptions into it.

In addition, there should be an horizontal scroll bar to be able to see the entire name of the feed and unread vs. total number of posts for that feed.

I’m still unsure how the “Subscribe” button should be used, it was always disabled. I have to go to “File” -> “Open RSS Feed” to start the process of get subscribed to a feed. And yes, I know that the Ctrl+O keyboard shortcut is available, but since I only added 5 feeds I never got used to it.

This is fun! I forgot that the Search field instead of searching in the entries that are locally stored goes to feedster and retrieves those posts containing the searched word from several feeds, and then the “Subscribe” button is enabled! Unfortunately is not obvious if I’m going to get subscribed to the feedster search string or to the feed of the selected entry. In any case my intention is to search in the posts of the feeds already in SharpReader, I may need to look into something I previously read.

A hidden issue is that it also uses the .NET framework, but was not critical because as I already said I have just 5 feeds in here and the performance issue isn’t seen because when selecting a feed in the left pane, no entry is shown in the reading pane. Something that starts to be of concern is that it is using 72 MB of RAM while idle.

A good thing is that when it’s starting it doesn’t consumes so much CPU as RSS Bandit (I think I forgot to mention this in its review).

I think that’s it, I didn’t used it too much so I’m unable to say more about it.

In summary SharpReader is pretty good in doing the job, but for guys like me with a lot of big and real needs, which I think I’ll have to point out in the summary of reviews, it still needs some little changes and a selection of a different framework.