April 21, 2005
@ 02:20 PM
Comments [7]
The End of the Quest for the Perfect RSS reader

I recently stumbled on a post entitled The end of the quest for the perfect RSS reader which made my day. The author wrote

RSS readers have lately been appearing all over the place, however, until recently I wasn’t able to find the perfect one. My needs are not huge. I want a reader which can synchronize feeds and read posts between several PCs, have a useful and selectable notification mechanism so I don’t miss important news, but still don’t get bothered with less important ones, display feeds in a tree without favicons, be robust and fairly fast, provide descent search functionality and saved searches, flag news items for easy follow up and review.

I have tried most of the existing Windows and web based aggregators, and each one had some of these missing. I recently checked the new version of RSS Bandit and my quest for the perfect RSS reader seems to have come to an end. RSS Bandit features all I need and provides even more nice goodies like integrated Feedster and Google searches.

If you are not completely satisfied with your reader, give RSS Bandit a spin. You won’t regret it.

It's really good to see people getting so much use of my favorite RSS reader. Of course, there is still a lot of interesting stuff we'd like to add to make it even better. Check out the roadmap for the Nightcrawler release to see where we plan to go in the next release.

If you currently aren't an RSS Bandit user but would like to try it out, download the latest version from here.


 

Categories: Mindless Link Propagation | RSS Bandit

« A Cynical View of PR and Blogging | Home | MSN Spaces Reviewed in the Wall Street J... »
Thursday, 21 April 2005 14:55:43 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Hi Dare,
Yeah, it looks like RSS Bandit is the best and the coolest. I see it looking at my RSS feed stats - two weeks ago nobody was using RSS Bandit. I had some hits with SharpReader, some with Onfolio, some with Newsgator and others - but none with RSS Bandit. It looks that people didn't know about that aggregator, because when I started promoting it on my blog, people started to use it! After two weeks about half of my readers are using RSS Bandit and the increasing trend is steady. That means they like it. I am happy to see it as I had the pleasure to contribute with Polish translation. It is awesome piece of software and I'd love to contribute to next versions just the same.

Kind regards
Michal Chaniewski
Thursday, 21 April 2005 17:50:10 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Hi,

RSS Bandit is indeed very cool. The ONLY reason I have decided to ditch it in favour of Bloglines is so that I can access my subscriptions from both home and work and elsewhere, without losing my changes. I don't have an account where I can (or more precisely, where I want to) put a file that your ftp feature can use...

If there is any way to integrate into Bloglines, that would be fantastic :)
juan
Thursday, 21 April 2005 23:46:28 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I am also very much impressed with the feature set and ease of usage of RSS Bandit. As with many, I also came across RSS Bandit after installing and unistalling many other RSS readers, but in all such readers I always felt the same "something missing" feeling. Tabbed browsing, locate feeds, remote storage, searching feeds, and simple yet powerful UI - simply love these features.
Thanks for providing us with such a great app!
Aayush
Friday, 22 April 2005 13:11:24 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Well, sadly, I've had to stop using RSS Bandit. Not that I wanted to, believe me; I particularly love the "river of news" features in the new release, and the "properties by categories" aspects. But, but, but, but... version 1.3.x will insist on "jumbling up feeds" periodically; every few refresh cycles, it will take posts from one feed and dump then in two or three others. Delete the feed and resubscribe and you're fine (except that you lose the archive of posts that are no longer in the feed)... until it happens again. And it happens with depressing regularity. Unchecked, each feed ends up looking like ann amorphous collection of other feeds, which renders it pretty useless.

I've seen this bug listed on the Sourceforge site, with non-committal "we haven't seen this behaviour" responses. Well, I've seen it, I'm fed up with it, and have (for now) switched back to SharpReader. Which is good, but not up to RSS Bandit; but at least it doesn't corrupt my feeds. I'd love to change back to RSS Bandit, but not until the corruption is sorted.
Koan Bremner
Friday, 22 April 2005 14:57:26 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Koan,
If you are seeing problems with blogs hosted on Blogspot then this is due to a problem in certain proxy servers. If these are other feeds then perhaps you can give me some details of your setup including whether you are using a proxy server.
kpako@yahoo.com (Dare Obasanjo)
Friday, 22 April 2005 20:29:32 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I agree. RSS Bandit rocks. I just started using the feeds-list synchronization to my ftp server and it so awesome. I just wish it would automatically upload the feedlist on app shutdown or on a regular basis. Anyway, no biggie since nearly everthing about the app is beautiful. Thanks Dare and the RSS Bandit team.
John Walker
Tuesday, 03 May 2005 01:24:56 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
RSS Bandit is a great .Net app. I was wondering if you've tried porting the code to the 2.0 framework. Is that on the roadmap?
Dave Neigler
Comments are closed.