November 6, 2007
@ 02:37 PM
Comments [20]
Phoenix Thoughts: My Top 5 Features for the Next Version of RSS Bandit

I’ve started thinking about the next release of RSS Bandit and I thought it would be a good time to share some of my thoughts with our users and see what people would like us to add, fix or otherwise improve the application. It’s hard to believe that I started working on RSS Bandit almost five years ago. In that time, we’ve had the application downloaded over a million times and at the height of it’s popularity we were seeing up to a 100,000 downloads a month when we shipped a new release. Since then the popularity of the application has waned a little with the advent of Web-based feed readers like Bloglines and Google Reader as well as the fact that the amount of work Torsten and I can get done in our spare time pales in comparison to what folks who do this for a living like Nick Bradbury can get done.

That said, there are features I want from a feed reader that I don’t get from FeedDemon or Google Reader which is why I still work on RSS Bandit and why I started this blog entry. Below are the list of features I want us to do in the Phoenix release in order of which ones are most likely to be in the final version. Let me know what you think of them.

  • Meme Tracking: I’m now officially at the point where I don’t have enough time to read all the feeds I have in my subscription list anymore. For the most part, I’ve gotten around this by browsing programming.reddit, Techmeme and Sam Ruby’s MeMeme about once or twice a day. Although they are all great, the problem I have is that there are parts of the blogosphere that none of these sites is good at tracking. For example, none of these sites is really on top of the Microsoft employee blogosphere which I’m interested in for obvious reasons.

    I've been talking about building a feature similar to FeedDemon's popular topics for a long time but I've now gotten to the point where I don't think I can get a lot of value out of my blog subscriptions without having this feature.

  • Podcast Management User Interface: We kind of ran out of time with the last release and shipped a podcast downloading feature without an actual user interface for managing your podcasts (i.e. seeing pending downloads, percent complete, etc) which is really lame. Since I don’t subscribe to a lot of podcasts, this hasn’t been an issue. However I suspect that the reason I don’t is exactly because we didn’t complete implementation of this feature.

  • Plugin Model: One of the things I haven’t liked is that sometimes I want to add a single feature but once I check it in, I still need to wait for all the features slated for that release before we can get it out to users. We could move to having more frequent releases but I’m not sure people want to deal with reinstalling the application every two months because I added a single feature. What I’d like us to build a plugin model where we can ship meaningful extensions to the core application without having it tied to a release.

    I like the multi-pronged approach taken by Windows Live Writer where there are multiple APIs provided depending on the depth of integration and complexity of the functionality you’d like to add to the application. Torsten started on this a while ago but we never got around to refactoring the proposed extensibility APIs in a way that satisfied us.

  • Feeds Grouped by Sources: Right now, I’m not really happy with the way our integration with NewsGator Online works. There’s an issue with the fact that NewsGator doesn’t know what to do with intranet feeds or feeds that are actually on your local machine (for the wacky folks that subscribe to their system event logs). In addition, folks have asked if we'll ever integrate with the Windows RSS platform and I've had concerns about that since there are features we need that it doesn't provide.

    I’ve considered that the solution to both problems is to break out the My Feeds node into three sub-nodes; RSS Bandit feeds, Windows RSS platform feeds (shared with IE, Outlook and Windows Live Mail) and NewsGator feeds. This would require some radical re-engineering since it now assumes we’ll be using three different stacks to poll for feed updates but in the long run I think this is the right approach. This is probably the most complicated and controversial feature we’ll have in the release.  

  • A Single Node Mapping to Multiple Feeds: I was recently looking at my FriendFeed page and it brought home to me that many geeks have multiple feeds that represent the content they are placing on the Web. For example, my friend Joshua Allen has a personal weblog as well as a work-related weblog. It’s really lame to have two entries for him in RSS Bandit when it’s all the same person.

    The main problems with a feature like this aren't around the complexity of the information but more around how to represent this to users in the application in a way that is understandable and easy to manage.

If you are an RSS Bandit user I’d love to hear what you think of this list. Does this list sound relevant to you or are there more pressing features you’d like to see addressed first? Also what are your pet peeves?

PS: Someone recently asked me if there are any corporate RSS Bandit users. I know a bunch of folks use it at work and that some places actually have it as part of the default install on their work PCs but don’t have any details handy. If you have any anecdotes to share, I’d appreciate it.

Now playing: G-Unit - Poppin Them Thangs


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

« Building a Platform is Hard | Home | Windows Live News: live.com email addres... »
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 15:53:56 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
One feature that I would like is to start weeding out feeds that have been inactive for a certain amount of time (say, a year). How about duplicate feeds? Somehow, I had a bunch of duplicates by importing an OPML feed list. When I read the exact same message twice, it takes me a minute or two to find the duplicate.
MartinJ
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 15:58:50 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
How about an "undo" button for the delete key !
Patrice Calve
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 16:16:21 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
At VRBO, we use an internal blog to do status updates and such, I believe everybody on the dev team uses RSS Bandit. We were doing NTLM authentication, but that turned out to be a big problem for posting tools - we couldn't find anything that supported both metaweblog and NTLM authentication.
Gordon Weakliem
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 16:41:20 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Unread Feeds View - so you don't have to scroll thru all the feeds you have looking for the next feed with unread items. Yes, I can click on the top level of the folder, but sometimes I want to pick the order I read the feeds in...
Matt Faulkner
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 17:54:06 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Sync with Google Reader will be a killer function. I prefer to use a desktop RSS reader but love the convenience of a web-based one.
MK
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 18:09:55 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Interesting. I have two itches about RssBandit (in addition to a need for some performance improvements if I am to continue using it the way I do):

1. Fitting into the social grid. I don't know what that means, but I think it is a valuable long-term direction. It is also an useful test of your own ideas of what makes that work, although that might make this avocation too much like your day job. Still, it interests me. I think that would be a pretty long-range, gradual project because the refactoring and componentizing might be pretty severe. (Can you say, "Windows Live Bandit?" Of course you can. Well, the marchitecture folks won't go for Bandit, but they don't get to say how built-atops get named by third parties.)

2. Opening formats, organization, and content. My fear is that I can't change aggregators now because of all of the content I have there now that I don't really own and that I can't extract in an useful way. I would really like the local stored format to be subject to Windows Desktop Search (once I tell it where to look) and as easy to get my hands on as Newsgator was in Outlook. Not having this is my greatest fear around the entropy death of RssBandit on my machine(s).
orcmid
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 20:46:42 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Dare,
with all due respect, performance improvement would be a great feature, too. Right now, RSS bandit i sway too slow (I have less than 200 feeds, most of which I browse, not read, but I keep them indefinitely) and it consumes too much memory.
IB
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 21:02:06 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Are those ActiveX pop-ups really fixed? I have downloaded the "latest file" several times but nothing changes. Check for updates also says there are none. Also, the download page shows the file as version Date September 16.

RssBandit1.5.0.17b_installer.zip has a file inside with the date 9/18/2007. I just downloaded it again to be sure.
Kal
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 21:34:45 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Here are the items at the top of my wish list:

* Unread Items shows only unread items instead of every item in every feed.

* Watched/Flagged Items becomes bold and shows the count of watched/flagged items. It's easy to forget I've marked posts for later follow-up because RSS Bandit doesn't give any visual indication items exist in these special folders.

* Unread Items Filter to say click on a feed or category and see only the unread items in that feed or category.

* Improved response when populating items in a category. Import Jason Haley's OPML for example and then click on the "Imported from Jason Haley" category. It takes several minutes to populate the list of feed items and scrolling doesn't work well while the list is being updated.

* Easy mechanism to move feeds to another category. Dragging and dropping is fine for short feed lists, but it isn't as convenient with hundreds of feeds. Say right click on a feed and have an entry Move To with a list of existing categories.

Lothan
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 21:43:31 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
"[...] Feeds Grouped by Sources [...] This is probably the most complicated and controversial feature we’ll have in the release. [...]"

I think you are right, but yep it definitely requires a great deal of change...




"[...] A Single Node Mapping to Multiple Feeds: I was recently looking at my FriendFeed page and it brought home to me that many geeks have multiple feeds that represent the content they are placing on the Web. For example, my friend Joshua Allen has a personal weblog as well as a work-related weblog. It’s really lame to have two entries for him in RSS Bandit when it’s all the same person.

The main problems with a feature like this aren't around the complexity of the information but more around how to represent this to users in the application in a way that is understandable and easy to manage. [...]"

this will automagically make what Dawe Winer called our "lifestream"....
I actually made this myself and provide a uninfied feed for my blog, my flickr pictures, my twitters, my facebook status messages, etc....
but sure, not everybody has done it for themselves, so it makes this a very (geeky) cool feature, letting people build those aggregated views of your content...

I am also wondering how to do this... there are many ways but I am not sure I prefer one over the other... you could maybe use a TAG to describe feeds that "belong together" and then show them both individually (as usual) AND also merged (due to the tag), by providing those alternative views from the treeview navigation on the left pane ?

Also I find that TAGGING/Labelling feeds (the google readed / gmail way) is way better than just placing them in folders, as often they belong to multiple categories (IMHO). This would basically provide a flat feeds namespace (for example also in the windows RSS platform you can create "folders" but then when you sync them in outlook 2007 you loose all the folders and have a flat list of feeds....).
keeping a flat namespace in sync between multiple apps is easier. each app can then provide TAGS to categorize the feeds, having them show under multiple categories, and even merging them in some cases...
Daniele Muscetta
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 22:22:31 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
... I just checked that I can probably hack the xslt myself, but would be nice to have it by default :)
ReallyVirtual
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 22:29:28 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I'd like to see it faster.
One of my main uses is to track Craigslist feeds.
I delete the ones that I'm not interested in, and delete is SLOW.
(It would also be nice if there was a delete icon on the toolbar so I don't have to use the keyboard for that.)
Cougar@CasaDelGato.Com (John Lussmyer)
Wednesday, 07 November 2007 00:10:11 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Poppin Them Thangs?
Fabulous Moolah
Wednesday, 07 November 2007 07:48:41 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Completely manual, ie user initiated, feed updates. I have never got RSS Bandit stop checking feeds after a feedlist download
Robin Capper
Friday, 09 November 2007 16:50:06 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Hi!

Of the RSS readers I have looked at RSSBandit is obviously the best one! :)

However my pet peeve is that you can't scroll thru read messages in the preview pane. You can scroll unread messages. To get to read messages you have to scroll thru the list of messages and then click on the one you want. Please provide an option to be able to scroll thru all messages both read and unread.

Also need a way to get back to scrolling mode. Once you click on a single message and bring it up in the preview pane there is no way that I can find to be able to get back into scrolling mode ikn the preview pane without closing the feed and reopening it. This is a real pain in the @#$%(*&$%.

Lastly the ability to move a folder to another place in the tree via drag and drop. Especially to be able to drop on the 'MyFeeds' folder and have it become a top level folder. I had to create a new folder and then drag all the feeds to it and then delete the old folder. Yuck.

Other than those 3 things I am very happy with the 'Bandit'! I use it both at home and at work.

An added feature might be the ability to see how much disk space a feed or all feed are taking up.

As an aside RSSBandit will use 100% of the CPU if you never mark anything as read! It would be usefull for a message to be displayed (ie. daily hints, etc.) that performance can be increased by marking items as read.

Thanks for all your hard work on RSSBandit!

Dave Venus
Dave Venus
Sunday, 11 November 2007 03:26:20 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I like the idea of grouping feeds as a single node - i can think of several in my list I can do that with.

For those feeds that include comments, it would be nice if we could look at all of the comments to a given post as a river in the preview pane like we can with the main posts in a feed.

Occasionally I see a bug where scrolling through the preview pane won't mark the viewed items as having been read.

Often if the last item(s) in the preview pane are too short for you to mark them as read by scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the preview pane. Append some empty space to the bottom of the panel to let you "overscroll" and get everything marked as read.

A "Cancel Update" button for when RSSBandit is checking a lot of feeds & getting bogged down.

Maybe a right-click -> "open in browser" option for feeds in order to open the page in the users default browser, external to RSSBandit.

Smaller memory footprint!

Sriram
Monday, 12 November 2007 11:40:09 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I'm new to RSS Bandit but so far it looks like the answer to all my complaints. From what I can tell it actually downloads the content, or at least the text, so I can read with it offline. We'll see in a few weeks on my next trip if it is the answer I've been looking for. :-)

From testing one thing I've noticed is that it doesn't seem to download pictures or anything else unless you have a live connection, that would be a nice option to have.
John
Tuesday, 13 November 2007 01:07:25 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
So, I'll chime in with another request - I still don't have a good sync option. Perhaps use SkyDrive? :-)
Gordon Watts
Wednesday, 14 November 2007 20:48:33 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I would love for RSS Bandit to finally support an Automatic Proxy Configuration URL for its proxy settings. It's too much of a pain to disable the proxy settings if I want to check my feeds from home.

I've recently switched to Google Reader specifically because I got tired of this, but I would much rather use RSS Bandit.
Dave Gilbert
Tuesday, 20 November 2007 13:10:56 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I've really only two issues with RSS Bandit.

1) I'd like to schedule feed updates to a particular day/time. Some feeds I only want to update once a day. However, I'd like to pull the feed at a particular time each day. An example of this is Raymond Chen's feed. He posts a particular time each day and I want to pull 23 hours later to read his post plus the comments from other readers. I'd also like to schedule the pull only for Mon-Fri (he doesn't post on the weekends).

Other feeds can be pulled on a certain day of the week or month or multiple (specific) times a day.

2) Unread Items does not update correctly. Obviously this is more of a bug, but still something I'd like fixed. I can go through and read every blog entry (where reading automatically marks the blog entry read), but unless I click the 'Mark as read' menu button, Unread Items doesn't update. Even then, there are still times where Unread Items gets 'stuck' thinking certain items aren't read (unless I shut down Bandit or explicitly go into Unread Items and click 'Mark as read'.

Otherwise, I'm quite happy with the application.
RonO
Comments are closed.