Anybody knows if Juice will ever support Atom feeds? It has been sleeping for several years now that I’m sure there are not developers left doing anything with it.
Anyone knows how can I get the source code? I would like to take a look and see if I can add the Atom support.
With great excitement I can tell you now that IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 is available for everyone to download for free!
It has good support for ODF, OpenOffice, MS Office and Lotus SmartSuite documents, so you can get rid of all of those other office applications and have just one installed (as I’m gonna do next!).
By now you may have already seen the announcement and press releases around the release of a free office suite that you can take advantage of (and stay legal or to not buy expensive licenses of products that pack tons of things that you never use, you know who “those” are 
).
Yep, it’s IBM Lotus Symphony and as I was reading through the press release I saw that it mentions that it “is the same tool inside some of IBM’s most popular collaboration products, such as the recently released Lotus Notes 8“, so this made me realize that this is actually what we (as of a couple of days) called IBM Productivity Tools (you can see this mentioned on Luis’ blog post titled Finally Joining the *Expensive* Mac Side!) and that I tried as Hannover Productivity Tools back in January! What a nice surprise!
For those that like to read and be up to date and the several happenings, here are some online articles that talk about it:
Try them and let the Lotus guys know what you don’t like or if you find bugs. Oh, yes, here’s the link to the support forums.
I’ve been using Omea Reader for quite some time now, I even mentioned an update some months ago.
I disabled a few plug-ins such as Contacts, Favorites, and News to improve the startup time of Omea Reader. I’m not sure if I can disable also the Notes and Pictures plug-ins, I haven’t done so in case the feed functionality needs them. One thing that I definitely don’t recommend is the use of the Favorites plug-in, it retrieves your Firefox bookmarks (and IE also I think) and stores them in an awkward way, not intuitive at all, it’s almost the opposite type of organization than in Firefox, and I have to say that when I installed Omea Reader the first time I had almost 5,000 bookmarks in Firefox, and really having them in Omea Reader didn’t make any sense; less because of the difficulty to find something there.
From here onwards I’ll talk about the details related to the feed reader support only.
To start I have to say that the functionality to parse (the RSS and Atom XML files) and show the entries or items is really good. I mean, Thunderbird still suffers from the Duplicate entries bug but I have never seen that behavior in Omea Reader. I like the way it shows the number of unread items to the right of the feed name, the same as in Thunderbird; the better part is that Omea Reader shows the unread number of items per folder, day, week, month or total. Right now it tells me that I have 243,198 unread items (of 251,128 total, this value is not easy to find out).
Another thing I like is that it gets and shows the favicons for each feed and on each entry (this is configurable), in both cases to the left. This is useful when you click on a feed folder because it shows all of the entries for each of the feeds under that folder. We can name it as categories, groups of feeds or whatever we want.
The default search is good, it searches in all of the feeds in any folder, so usually you get a lot of items in the result list, or at least that happens to me because of the bunch of feeds (172 at the moment) I have and I don’t specify to auto-delete aged entries, I keep everything. The Advanced Search functionality offers several good options, but I don’t use it, it’s a bit complex when the interface and options could be easier I think. That part needs to be more intuitive.
One of its weaknesses, and I think the same applies for most aggregators, is that with the number of entries it holds, the memory usage is 117,160 KB, and consuming a Virtual Memory of 120,408 KB in Windows XP.
Another big problem is the ‘Database’ size. That directory’s size, without including subdirectories, is 591 MB. The db subdirectory is 611 MB, and the backup subdirectory contains a zip file of 123 MB in size. I can disable this database backup directory but I’m thinking this may help to store all of the entries for the future. Although I’m just realizing that the Help doesn’t mentions it, the screenshot in there doesn’t even have that option! Maybe the files in that zip aren’t useful at all.
Guess what? I shouldn’t have tried to search in the Help for “backup”, now Omea Reader is not responding! Looks to me like certain threads are stuck but others are working, I just saw an alert that it updated a feed with a new item. Curious! I had to end it. Nothing strange about this appears in the logs.
Without counting the logs and the binaries and dlls for it to run it takes 1,325 MB of hard disk space. Including everything it takes 1.41 GB.
What I would like to see in the Properties for each feed is a checkbox to index the contents, selected by default but at least providing a way to avoid specific feeds to be indexed and thus also avoid the “Database” directory to be so big.
Another thing is that RSS feeds seem to contain a tag for comments to entries, and so Omea Reader shows a ‘+’ symbol to the left of each entry allowing you to click on it to “expand” the entry and see its comments. Obviously Omea Reader does not download them by default, it does so in the moment you click on the plus sign. I would like to see the same for Atom feeds, not sure if this is something yet to be implemented in the Atom specification or in Omea Reader.
The last thing that I’ll mention is that there’s an icon in the top right corner of the preview pane that is a double arrow pointing to the bottom that you click and it shows more information about the entry, but in fact it just shows the same information that is at the top of the preview pane, the “From” and “Weblog” fields, and that’s all. It needs to really show every bit of additional info for that particular entry, not just what is shown in the list of entries pane. The columns for the list of entries pane can be configured and is the one that shows more information, but looks like it still needs to support more than one category (this is the “Pub. Category” column), because we in IBM are using it as the tags, so usually an entry has more than one tag and so it represents more than one category for an individual entry from a feed reader point of view.
That’s it. It certainly has several things to configure and filter stuff, but I don’t use them. You’ll have to try it out to provide your own opinion. You’ll find it here.
Now that I had the time to review it, and create this blog post, I’ll consider the move to Omea Pro since it’s now free since December 4, 2006. There were plans to make it open source but I haven’t heard anything yet about that.
By this time all of you already know that IE7 and Firefox 2.0 were already released, but what I liked, or better said what I saw like a nice thing is that the Microsoft Internet Explorer team sent a cake to the guys at Mozilla for the release of Firefox 2.0
I haven’t tried any of them yet, just downloaded Firefox 2.0 and will try to install it in the upcoming days. IE7 may have to wait, although I don’t really use it too much I prefer to wait and see if it works with all products and sites, and see also how the support from other products/sites is progressing.
Yesterday and today I have been getting an error from w.bloggar where it says that shdocvw.dll is not correctly registered, something like that.
Today I got a different message for the error where the error window is named “RainDrops ActivePack for Visual Basic http://www.activepack.cjb.net” and the message contents are:
339 Component ’shdocvw.dll’ or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid rdActiveForm frmCodeLib::picSysBar_MouseMove
There are already 10 icons of w.bloggar in the system tray, and I rebooted the machine (T41 with XP SP2) minutes before. This isn’t looking good.
Looked worst when I went to the above URL and saw that Marcelo Leal Limaverde Cabral (the creator of w.bloggar) created the freeware “ActiveX Tools Pack for Visual Basic 6″ and uses it on w.bloggar. His web page opens a pop-up window that contain several iFrames where at leas one loads a not work safe page. Bad!
So, even when I’m using the w.bloggar that uses the Mozilla engine (or something like that, it uses ActiveX and Visual Basic, both of which I don’t like very much.
Because of all of the above and lack of response from the tool author I’m definitely going to take a look to other options. Oh yes!
I used the 1.0.x versions of Thunderbird during several months, I don’t really remember when I first installed Thunderbird, I was previously using the Mozilla suite and moved to Firefox and Thunderbird at the same time. Everything was almost smooth and good with the 1.0.x, until January this year when I updated from 1.0.7 to 1.5.
I said almost smooth above because I’ve suffered the consecuences of the Duplicate entries appear in feeds bug.
Thunderbird 1.5 continues to have a lot of good features as an RSS/ATOM aggregator, bear in mind that I’ll mention here only this support, because as an NNTP, and mail client it’s excellent.
The way you can group the feeds, the way it shows the name of the feeds and their icons, the list of entries and their icons, all are so descriptive and well done. I like a lot the field to search for the posts by title or sender.
The RSS subscriptions now default to load the web page for each feed entry. From Thunderbird 1.0.7 I already had the “Show the article summary instead of loading the web page” checked for all of the feeds I’m subscribed to. When I updated to 1.5, I was subscribed to 84 feeds, had to verify one by one that the mentioned option was checked, a waste of time indeed. The big problem is that for several feeds it doesn’t want to pick up the summaries again, hmm.
Seems that the XML parser is broken in some way, I’m pretty sure is broken for RSS feeds. Sometimes it just grabs one blog entry when other feed readers retrieve more, or maybe it just doesn’t goes and retrieves the feeds again; something happens internally that it stops checking the feed. In some other occasions it says that the feed is not valid, but according to Firefox and RssReader the XML is valid and parses without a problem. So, yes, if I were using only Thunderbird to keep track of news feeds I would have already lost a lot of blog posts.
Looks like it doesn’t pay attention now to the dc:date field. After I installed Thunderbird 1.0.7 it got 22 blog posts from one feed but the Date column shows 1/15/2006 11:23 PM for all of them!! This is pretty bad, obviously the time isn’t the same for all of them, this is a regression.
The Manage Subscriptions has some odd bugs. The RSS Subscriptions window shows me a folder without its feed and I can see the feed and its entries in the Thunderbird left pane, how am I supposed to modify the settings for that feed? For another folder it showed me 3 feeds with the same name and allowed me to edit the feed properties, so I decided to remove 2 of them and now I can’t edit the properties! In fact now it’s showing me 2 feeds with the same name in there but can’t edit any. Pretty weird and annoying.
One thing I should applaud is that at startup it uses several threads to retrieve the feeds and the updates are pretty quick, without disruption of CPU usage or memory consumption.
One problem that has been so mentioned here and there is that it has some memory leaks that I believe come from the Firefox codebase.
Right now Thunderbird is using 150 MB of memory, and this is due to the memory leak, becuase yesterday it was using around 70 MB consistently. And when selecting a feed it uses some amount of CPU for less than 2 seconds, with a peak of 70% of CPU, which is more than excellent. Now that I selected another feed the memory usage is 88 MB, seems it depends of the selected feed and how many entries it has. The biggest one, with more than 67,000 entries, causes Thunderbird to use 139 MB of memory.
The last thing I have to say about this application, that actually talks very good about it is that is the only one that is handling the biggest number of posts, the older post which is when I did the last backup is from July 15th, and the total number of posts may be around 126,000 !! Using 231 MB of hard disk space.
Something that I don’t like too much is the way it stores the feeds on hard disk, looks like when the name of the feed is big it creates a folder with the name aa8f7dc2.sbd that doesn’t have any contents in it! There are a couple of files with the same name as the directory but at the same level as the directory itself, one without extension and the other file with an extension of .msf. So, in the end there are 3 objects per feed, an empty directory and 2 files.
I’ll give Thunderbird a chance, I’m going to backup all of those files, in addition to my newsgroups and mail files, will uninstall it, remove any of its files, user files, and then I’m going to install it again, restore the mail and newsgroups stuff but add the feeds one by one being sure that for all of them it’s retrieving the summary or whole contents of the posts instead of loading the web pages.
Wish me luck!
I really appreciate the good work the developers did with this tool, I wish the issues I’m having are fixed in the near future.
Kudos to the developers and to the Open Source effort around the world!
This time I’m going to talk about RssReader which was the first news feed reader I started to use a couple of years ago.
RssReader is one of those that is also simple, but pretty good at doing his job. There are not much bad things I can say about it but I will mention them here.
It uses the .NET framework and obviously the IE engine. I have 93 feeds in here, and due to the use of the IE engine, sometimes I get IE popups opened, really annoying.
I’m using version 1.0.88.0 which is 2 years old, the latest one seems to be 1.0.91.0 that is a beta released for testing and I haven’t downloaded it because of it, maybe it’s better than the one I’m currently using but not sure if stable enough, perhaps I’ll give it a try in some more days.
I would like to see easily the number of totals posts versus the number of read and unread per feed and in summary for all of the feeds.
I really love the ease of use of the tool bar, the option to check the feeds, to add feeds, to add groups, to edit the properties of a feed, the option to clear the headline history, the pull down menu to select the type of the headlines I want to see in the listing pane for example, the new posts, the unread, the read ones. The date filter is also usefull and what to say about the keyword field to search the headlines, just awesome!
I like that it can be minimized to the system tray, this can be done with the others also but with RssReader is easier, maybe not, but there’s something special. I like a lot the way it shows the popup with the headlines of the entries after it finished checking a round of them.
Another thing so unique and that I appreciate a lot is that you can customize the size, style, color of the font for each kind of item in the reader, for example, for groups whether read, unread, etc.; for feeds read, unread or failed; for headlines read, unread, new, important, etc.; for the previews; that way you can easily identify what you want.
It has several minor issues that can be improved of course. One of them is that I don’t know how it does the scan of the feeds, seems like if it uses only one thread and takes a lot of time to go through all of them; when it’s started the icon in the system tray doesn’t respond for several minutes, and if one of the feeds is not reachable or there’s a problem with the feed it shows a little window (modal? I forgot how that’s called) telling that it failed to read the ATOM feed, it doesn’t tell which feed nor if it’s really an ATOM one, but it fails with the same message always. If I don’t click on it then it won’t continue scanning the rest of the feeds, sometimes it does it, it’s kind of strange.
I don’t know why it does not remember when I right click on the system tray icon and click on the “Sound on” to disable it, whenever I start it I can see that the option is selected again, hmm.
When talking about feeds and how it shows them I’m going to mention that it had troubles when creating the html to display the feed for the IBM internal blogs, the published date sometimes wasn’t in the place it should be, and the entries got unaligned in rare cases.
Something that I learned about it is that all of the contents of the feeds are stored in the storage.xml file and the HTML files stored under the HTML directory are created only when that feed was selected, so the page shown had to be recreated again and again; this applies also for the groups.
It currently has around 12,000 entries using 9.6 MB of hard disk space and obviously using other 9.9 MB for the HTMLs and icons for each feed. It doesn’t have much right now because I archived the old entries 2 or 3 weeks ago, I’ve had around 70,000 entries previously with the proportional hard disk usage.
I was forgetting to mention that when it has more entries it takes it more time at startup to parse the entire xml, and the memory usage climbs up to 300 MB. Something for which the culprit, I think, is the .NET framework.
In general after startup RssReader is responsive and quick, and doesn’t needs excesive amounts of memory. When selecting a channel or a group it eats more memory, and CPU also, but when it’s done everything returns to comfortable levels.
For sure I’ll keep RssReader, it does the job and provides me with several simple functions that I need. I must say that the developers did a great job. I really look forward to the next version that is not a beta for testing.
Keep up the good work !! I’m eagerly awaiting for the next release 
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:
There’s a link at the end to see more information, and when clicking on it I can see the following: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.
Error signatureAnother 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.
AppName: newzie.exe AppVer: 1.0.0.1 ModName: lpdll.dll
ModVer: 1.0.0.1 Offset: 0000a4e2
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.
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.
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