RSS Readers on the PC: RSSOwl, SharpReader, Sage
Comments: 4 - Date: January 29th, 2007 - Categories: Tech Reviews
Since switching from a Mac to a PC, I’ve been on a hunt for an RSS Reader that is as good as the Mac’s NetNewsWire. Simple, clean, and customizable interface. A thin-client for reading about 150 feeds that I’ve lumped into about 6 categories. I have finally found it in RSSOwl.
Sage: Although this seems to be the most popular choice amongst the people I’ve polled, Sage is completely unacceptable to me. When I load a feed that has 20 unread posts, all 20 are loaded into the right-hand viewer screen. That seems great and super-efficient, until you realize that all 20 will remain marked as unread until I have taken the additional, unnecessary step of clicking on every single one of the post titles in the lower-left-hand screen. Why do I have to click on a title to mark it as read when I have already read it? My second complaint about Sage is that when I click on a folder containing multiple blogs, I cannot see the posts of the blogs within this folder. I follow a blog and its comments through 2 RSS feeds and I want to see the comments and posts together, time sorted. This is not possible in Sage. Next!
SharpReader: I used SharpReader for about 2 months and have found it to be much better than Sage, but not a clear winner. It has the logical 3 pane layout where you select a blog (or a folder containing multiple blogs!) and that shows you the titles and you click on the titles to read the post and to mark the post as read (one click does both!). It runs as an icon in your task bar, so you can access it easily and it doesn’t take up a lot of room. My complaints are that there are very few customizable options for how the display works and it causes some bad display flickering on my machine when it is updating the feeds or refreshing its view. The feature that I don’t particularly like but can’t turn off is that when it updates my feeds in the foreground or background, it has pop-up windows that end up covering the entire right-hand side of my computer screen and making my entire desktop flicker like mad until I click on some other application. Basically, I’d say it is an acceptable alternative to Sage, but kind of rough around the edges.
RSSOwl: This reader was recommended on the Simple Dollar a while back and I finally tried it out last week. It is just like NetNewsWire, but free! It doesn’t have any of the annoyance/bugs that the other 2 have and even has tabbed browsing, if you want. Or you can turn tabs off if you don’t want them. And you can customize the point at which you move your RSS reading over to your preferred browser. And you can adjust the colors and fonts of the post reader window. Basically, it is what I want: a client that can handle the organization of ~150 feeds in ~6 folders, allowing me to efficiently read many posts, plus it has some additional customizable features that make it enjoyable to use.
Comment by Jim Morris - 29 January 2007 @ 9:25 pm
Why don’t you just use Google personalized page?
Comment by Joan DiMicco - 30 January 2007 @ 7:12 am
I don’t use it because Google’s personalized page time sorts all of my feeds into one lump view, showing just the top unread posts. It doesn’t tell me how many unread posts are found within each feed. I often have over 100 unread posts in some categories (say, tech news) and I don’t bother to read those posts on mosts days. On the other hand, I have other categories of posts (say, friends and family) where I want to immediately see how many posts there are and selectively choose which of those posts to read. Google’s solution is best if you are only following a couple feeds and you consider them to be of equal importance.
Comment by Josh - 30 January 2007 @ 8:51 am
Why not use a server-side reader like bloglines.com so your feeds are available from anywhere? For example, on
your phone, on your laptop, or from a random location when you don’t have your laptop with you? The network
is the computer!
Comment by Joan DiMicco - 30 January 2007 @ 1:59 pm
I think Bloglines is pretty good. I guess the main reason I am not drawn towards using it is that I would like to have the option to read blog content when I am offline. Admittedly I don’t do that much and I do like the idea of reading my blogs on my phone, so maybe I should try to use it some. Some feel that Bloglines (or any online solution) is bad because you are making your company’s internal RSS content public to the world. That is definitely an issue for me, but I’m not sure my stand-alone, off-line application isn’t mining that data as well.
Interface wise, Bloglines doesn’t allow you to browse a list of post titles and pick and choose which ones to read. When you click on a blog, it shows you all of the posts and marks them all as read. I like to browse the titles and decide which ones are worth reading. And tomorrow, I might want to browse the list again and pick some new posts to read.
In contemplating this topic so much, I’ve remembered a feature of NetNewsWire that I miss which none of these apps offer: a “flag” option where you can flag a post so that it never disappears from your reader. It is like a bookmark, but it is kept within the context of the blog you read it in.
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