Status Update: The Showdown
Two days ago I wrote about how I was trialling two different newsreaders - GreatNews and Newzie.
I know it's already been two days, but there's already a clear winner between the two :) I haven't opened Newzie in the last day.
I really did try to be fair, and use both for a long time (use one one day, the other the next), but it just hasn't worked out that way.
In fact, Newzie almost lost me the moment I started. When I fired Newzie up for the first time, I imported my OPML file - and then to my horror had to individually check each of the items in the list to import. Over 200 check boxes were presented to me in a list. All of them were unchecked. Multiselect (or a select all button) was not present. God Damn!
Great had them all checked by default, so all I had to do was click next.
I forgave that one (I'm sure it's something I can report and get fixed pretty quickly), but to be honest I just found the entire application unintuitive to use.
I do want to make myself clear. I think Newzie was a pretty good app, but it ended up just not being something that works the way I want it to.
There's a flip side to this story however. GreatNews was a clear winner for me out of the two, that part was easy. But to be honest - I'm not really finding myself that big a fan of GreatNews either. It's easier to use (I found) than Newzie, but I'm still not entirely happy with it.
So I might start the quest of finding the ultimate RSS reader. I think it's time to have a look at how Omea Reader is doing - I used it all through it's beta cycle and after it RTMd, but I gave it away in favour of bloglines because I was working on multiple computers - and it got a bit slow with a lot of feeds subscribed at once. Maybe some bug fixes have sped it up :)
Actually, one thing I've been waiting for is IE7 RTMing so I can start coding against the final API of the RSS store that's used by both IE and Outlook. I might see how easy it is to write myself my own reader, now that I don't have to worry about storage, parsing and fetching myself. Hmm..I might call it Grief. Geoff's Rss from IE Feed reader :)