RSS Bandit [Jubilee Edition] Status Update

May 17, 2006

@ 04:06 PM

I just saw the following post on in the RSS Bandit forums entitled Dead? where one of our users asks

Haven't seen a news update in a long time, no releases for about 5 months... is rss bandit dead? It's a nice aggregator, but there are some neat features popping up in stuff like Rss Owl / other feed readers, so I'm debating changing readers...

...but if there's going to be active improvements in the future, there's no reason for me to learn an entirely new program just to come back to rss bandit in the end. ;)

What say you, Code Writers?

This has been bothering me as well. Torsten and I have been busy with our respective day jobs. Over the past few of months, I keep telling myself I'll start work on RSS Bandit "next week" but the following week always seems busier than the last. It hasn't helped that I've had conferences, vacations or out of town visitors every other month this year. I think I have the worst of the disruptions in my schedule done for this year. In addition, the project which has been consuming the lion's share of my time at work also looks like it will soon be able to go on auto-pilot.

Although I can't give an exact date for our next release, what I can say for sure is that we will have an RSS Bandit release this summer. What I would like from our users is some feedback on the RSS Bandit road map. I don't think I'm particularly attached to the features we currently have on tap for the Jubilee release. The major reworkings I'd like to do for the next release are fixing our excessive memory consumption, improving the integration with NewsGator Online, and rewriting our multithreaded code in a way that fixes the pernicious feed mix up issue. As for new features, the ones I want primarily revolve around enclosures/podcasts and conversation tracking similar to TechMeme, Megite and TailRank.

I believe Torsten also plans to revamp our UI. What else would you like to see us do in the next release?

Categories: RSS Bandit

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Wednesday, 17 May 2006 17:10:04 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Two features that I would really like to see added are:
1. Support deleting a feed item when the item has focus. Say I'm reading a post and scrolling through it. I would like to just be able to hit the delete key and have that post deleted. As it stands now, I have to click the headline to delete it.

2. Support undo when you delete a post. It's great that the deleted post gets put in a folder somewhere, but if I delete a post and then realize that I didn't want to, I would like to use ctrl-z and have the post(s) reappear in that folder.

Jim Geurts

Wednesday, 17 May 2006 17:18:36 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Oh, I just thought of one other thing, though it's not directly related to the Rss Bandit source. It would be nice if there was an extension for Firefox to add "Subscribe in Rss Bandit" via the right-click menu. Where the extension would then fire up Rss Bandit and have it go through the wizard to autodiscover the feed for the current site...

Jim Geurts

Wednesday, 17 May 2006 17:27:13 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

The one big thing I'm missing is enclosure handling for podcasts and MIME handling for Usenet (enclosures show up encoded as part of the message and I have to open Outlook Express to get them, ouch). Being able to track the comments I leave in others' blogs would be helpful too. I solved the syncronization issue by running RSSBandit off my thumb drive, since it lives in my briefcase. And the editor for authoring new posts would be nice, especially if it also replaces the window in the current version for adding posts to Usenet.

Thanks!

John Meyer

Wednesday, 17 May 2006 18:11:56 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

I'd love a better way of flagging items. To do this, I'd love to be able to configure the types of flags. You could keep the existing ones, but allow the user to edit/delete them and add their own. THis would allow me to flag something to remind me to blog it, or to read at home, or to email to a friend.

gfox

Wednesday, 17 May 2006 22:56:45 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

To Jim: You can always install LiveLines so that you can override the Live Bookmarks integration in Firefox. In Firefox 2.0 you'll be able to set which feedreader you want to use with feeds.

To Dare: The one reason I can't use RSS Bandit is the way feeds with errors are handled. Since basically any feedreader out there can handle small errors in feeds, RSS Bandit puts the feeds in "quarantine" with no way for me to read them. As an end-user it's pretty useless to know that a feed is broken it should show up anyway unless it's really really broken.

Patrick

Wednesday, 17 May 2006 23:47:25 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

I think with Jubilee, you're coming out with the feature that will autosynchronize with the FTP? That is the major thing lacking currently.
It'd be nice if urls could be passed silently to Firefox instead of having the Firefox window pop up each time I double click on an entry.
OTherwise great program!

ckkoba@ckkoba.com (Michael)

Thursday, 18 May 2006 03:37:46 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

I'd love to see podcast/enclosure support.

I'd also like to see per-feed or per-category filters - for example, getting rid of any Engadget post with the word "cellphone" in the subject.

Ben Hollis

Thursday, 18 May 2006 08:42:10 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Hello,

Another useful feature would be to show the web address when browsing a web page in a separate tab: indeed, web pages do not always work correctly (well at least in my case ;-) ), and I'd like to copy/paste the link in another browser...

Of course, another menu item like "Show this page in default browser" would do just as well !

Emmanuel

Thursday, 18 May 2006 10:06:08 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

The conversation tracking is one of the best things about RSS Bandit and this is where I'll like to see more improvements. I'd like for it to be easier to say "I want to track comments from this post" and "show me all new comments in this folder (of blogs)"

alex

Thursday, 18 May 2006 10:14:27 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Hi Dare,

I agree with gfox that flagging could be improved. When reading posts I like having the ability to flag items directly from where I'm reading them. But currently this only allows setting/clearing the flag and not allows to set the type of flag to use. I'm often reading the whole feed/category at once and not per post which means that the headlines list isn't synced with the post i'm currently reading and therefore may be off screen.

Being able to flag posts with user-defined flag types and with multiple flags would also be very welcome.

I have a very small issue with file: URLs (so I can hook up local filesystem feeds with RSS Bandit). This works but if I use the wizard and paste in a URL like file:///C:/foo/news.xml I have to uncheck the autodiscover checkbox otherwise it won't locate the feed.

Ah one more .... would it be a good idea to put some basic (tech) info such as the feed type (Atom, RSS x.y), last updated etc. into an Info tab on the feed properties window? Maybe some of the options on the Feed Subscriptions | This Feed context menu could move there too so this context menu is shorter. The property window can easily be reached with CTRL+P.

It's a great reader though, I used Sharpreader before, then switched to RSS Bandit and never looked back.

Marc

Thursday, 18 May 2006 17:17:01 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

I'd like to see the NNTP integration improved; what's there now is so close to useless that I switched back to using Outlook Express. :-( It's not hard to be OE as a newsreader, RSS Bandit should at least do no worse.

Improved comment tracking would be nice. When I comment on somebody's blog, I often want to check back to see if there have been any comments to my comment.

The #1 thing I *LOVE* about RssBandit is that it can handle "headline only" feeds like C|Net well: just double click on the item and it opens in a new tab. No new windows, no click-move-click, etc.

J. Daniel Smith

Thursday, 18 May 2006 22:02:59 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Not sure if this would be too much, but some sort of PDA sync (windows mobile) would be AWESOME! I have a lot of feeds, and I sometimes have to devote a bunch of time siting in front of my computer just catching up. Being able to take a few minutes here or there just working with my pda would a lifesaver.

Mike

Friday, 19 May 2006 01:49:00 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

I would like to see the feed "gatherer" split from the application so that I don't have to have the UI running to retrieve feeds ( maybe a service ?). This means that I can log off at night, but not miss any items from short lived feeds ( like slashdot )

slaneyrw@hotmail.com (Robert Slaney)

Friday, 19 May 2006 21:30:31 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

try to focus more. adding peripheral features like NNTP when there are perfectly capable readers out there strikes me as a bad idea. given that you have limited time, why not focus on feeds instead of trying to do everything half-assed?

adding conversation tracking, on the other hand, seems useful.

Gregor J. Rothfuss

Saturday, 20 May 2006 23:41:17 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Dare, who came up with the name RSS Bandit? I take it whomever it was probably from the UK or Ireland -- lol. You must be smothering an evil cackle to yourself everytime someone says it out loud...

Oisin G.

Sunday, 21 May 2006 21:37:12 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

I'd like to see some integration with the IE7 feeds so I can synchronize them or move them (from IE to RSS Bandit, of course!).

Thanks for a great program!

Walter Lounsbery

Tuesday, 23 May 2006 16:01:43 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

if I could suggest a solution to my above request...

add "date of last comment added" (you could then sort by this if you so desired)

alex

Tuesday, 23 May 2006 17:19:09 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Sorry i might didn't get it rigth, but where can I get the RSS Bandit ?

John

Monday, 29 May 2006 01:52:49 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

I'd like keyboard navigation improved. It is too Emacs'y and could be much lighter. Ctrl-Q is quit in most application, that should be changed. Web links do not open consistently in new tabs and end up using previous tabs sometimes. Opening more than a few tabs makes the main news pane tab scroll away :( . No way to switch between tabs. New items display does not update in the left tree properly, only clicking on the group makes it update. Ctrl-Q on a search folder sometimes makes the whole application and windows GDI display break really bad. Feeds fail to update on schedule after leaving the program open for a while.

Ability to mark a link as permanently read would be good. I don't want future links to the same item about AJAX I've read 2000 times already.

Ability to launch a link in a tab only on special (e.g. Ctrl-Click) otherwise reusing the same main ariticle pane.

Better thread keyboard navigation - Currently left arrow on an expanded node does not close it. Arrow keys do not work consistently. The focus shift between articles headings pane and article pane is random breaking navigation. Space key scrolls the article inconsistently.

Let me know if you want more.

alex

Wednesday, 31 May 2006 16:53:40 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

One more thing I came across recently. Somehow I accidentally deleted a whole category of blogs. It would be nice if those were put in the recycle bin so I could recover them somehow. As it turned out, I was lucky enough to have RSS Bandit on another machine and I had synched it so I was able to recover.

gfox

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