June 9, 2004
@ 05:22 PM
Comments [10]
Making RSS Bandit Competitive with Commercial Aggregators

I recently wrote that I want to make RSS Bandit compete more with commercial aggregators which elicited a comment about what exactly this means. Primarily it means that it is my intention that we should support what I consider are the three primary differentiating features of the commercial desktop aggregators I've seen (NetNewsWire, FeedDemon and NewzCrawler). The features are

  1. Newspaper Views: FeedDemon has the ability to display news items in a newspaper view which is a feature that Torsten batted around a few months ago but decided not to do because we didn't think it was that useful. However now that I read a number of feeds that tend to publish 30 - 50 items a day, being able to view the entries in a single page actually would be useful. My goal is for this feature to be 100% compatible with FeedDemon newsjpaper views meaning that you can use existing FeedDemon newspapers such as Radek's newspaper views for FeedDemon with RSS Bandit.

  2. WYSIWYG Weblog Editor: This feature was on my old RSS Bandit wishlist but I never got around to implementing it because of my displeasure with the MetaWeblog API. I've been waiting for the Atom project to produce a SOAP based API with built in authentication that would be widely supported by blogging tools before implementing this feature but it is now clear that such a specification won't be finalized anytime soon.  Since I don't do much GUI work I'll definitely need help from either Torsten or Phil with getting this done.

  3. NNTP Support: The promise of providing a uniform interface to various discussion forums whether they are Web based discussions exposed via RSS or in USENET is too attractive to pass up.

Of course, we will also fix the various bugs and respond to the various feature requests we've gotten from a number of our users. Torsten is currently on vacation and I'll most likely be gone for a week later on this month so development probably won't start in earnest until next month. Until then keep your feedback coming and thanks a lot for using RSS Bandit.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

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Wednesday, 09 June 2004 21:37:07 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Personally I think WISYWIG editor will be a waste of time. w.bloggar does the job for now, and when I am reading, I am not writing anyway. RSS Bandit has a Flag Item... option that does the job of sorting cool stuff you want to return to. I will use my favorite Web/GUI tool for writing to my blog, and Web browser for writing to other people's blogs.
Alex Moskalyuk
Wednesday, 09 June 2004 21:44:58 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I think in the same vein as Newspaper views, and especially for feeds which are just headers and a brief description--pointers to full articles, a subheader--implemented like a multiline-per-entry listbox (is there a control or an option for this?) consisting of the first few words of the item contents would be useful. It is such a waste to have to click every entry to read 3 word descriptions and then press read on if it's interesting.
thadk
Wednesday, 09 June 2004 23:44:19 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
The Newspaper view would be cool, but even better would be a customizable view.

The WYSIWYG is must have. The geeks don't like it because they like to type HTML code, but for the general populace, it's a must have.
Randy Charles Morin
Thursday, 10 June 2004 01:12:58 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Why WYSIWYG? Why not just implement the IBlogExtension interface like NewsGator and let other 3rd party editors integrate with it? That would be a much better use of your time, and would let you focus on aggregation while others focus on integration. The idea is to do what you do best, let others dop what they do best, and make it as easy for them to do their jobs together as possible.
Robert McLaws
Thursday, 10 June 2004 02:44:43 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I paid for newsgator for my own usage, but I didn't pay for it for any of the above reasons... I paid for it because it integrates in Outlook and I'm already replicating my Outlook data around so that I can get at it from multiple machines, including via outlook web access & via activesync on my pocket pc phone. I don't use the newspaper views or the NNTP support, and I occasionally use a community developed .text plugin to post to my blog but usually I use .text's web interface. I don't know if my experience is at all common though or if I'm just a one-off. I tried RSS bandit for a while, and while the Outlook integration isn't a hard and fast requirement for me, it's a perk that keeps me coming back to newsgator. Actually, with OPML sharing across machines, that would get me 90% of the way there, it's very rare that I read any of the feeds on my phone anyway. I will give it another shot soon.
KC Lemson
Friday, 11 June 2004 06:20:44 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
A WYSIWYG editor would be a great addition. It would be nice to have all this in one application. Reading and writing is a part of the same process.

- Ashvil
(Currently using RSS Bandit and w.bloggar)
ashvil_d@yahoo.com (Ashvil)
Tuesday, 15 June 2004 16:40:56 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
To be as good as a professional Tool RSS Bandit first off all NEEDs A GOOD DESIGN!!!

Look out there on the net. There hat to be a way to find somone wo redesign the "Corporate Design"... Some Icon-Designer or some Schools that to it during courses...
Tobias
Thursday, 17 June 2004 21:29:37 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I just posted something that would make a great "enterprise" feature here:
http://aaronthearchitect.com/blog/archive/2004/06/17/157.aspx
Aaron A. Anderson
Thursday, 24 June 2004 08:03:25 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
It's very good.
zzm
Sunday, 04 July 2004 15:31:49 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Hi guys.
It will be very usefull to see on task manager. This program use 221 user objects and 324 gdi objects 26M of memory. This double MSWORD 2003 (100, 275, 9.5). COOL!
dr-Wicked
Comments are closed.