4/7/2003: 11:10 am: RobertBlogging and RSS
SharpReader is my new favorite 3-pane news aggregator for Windows. NewsDesk and Syndirella just have too many undesirable quirks. SharpReader has a cleaner UI and significantly better usability.
Too bad it is a .NET app, as I would like to use it on Linux, as well. However, this is the first .NET app that makes me think the Mono project is a worthwhile effort.
Update 7/29/03: While SharpReader remains a very nice news aggregator, the newest release of NewsDesk is also quite good. I’m currently using NewsDesk primarily on my work laptop and NewsMonster on my home machine, both under Linux and Windows.
June 18th, 2003 at 1:09 pm
Hi Robert,
What specifically did you find quirky or unusable in NewsDesk? If this is something I can remedy, I would like to.
Thanks,
Dave
June 18th, 2003 at 11:36 pm
Dave,
It’s very interesting you posted this comment today. I had already decided to give NewsDesk another try this morning after I noticed that the 1.0 release was available. Then I arrive home late tonight and discover your comment on my weblog. : )
I’m much happier with this release and have decided to go back to using it at work, where I am usually running Windows. At home, I use Linux(and OS X) as much as Windows, so I decided to go with NewsMonster.
This Friday, I am giving another presentation at work on weblogging tools and news aggregators. During the demo, I was planning to show off NewsDesk. This presentation will be for about 15-20 software engineers.
I did see a few odd issues today with the 1.0 release. A lot of RSS feeds were timing out. In nearly every case, if I manually retried an individual feed, it worked. I did get several unhandled exceptions. I think the message had something to do with an invalid string. I’ll email you the error text and the URLs for the specific feeds.
Most of the issues I had seen with the earlier release (0.8?) were gone. The gray background made the text hard to read. Lots more feeds were causing errors on that release. That was definitely the biggest problem.
By the way, I’m very impressed that you are going to the effort to check in with people to see why they might have any issues with your software.
Robert