RSS newsreaders

I am a big fan of Sage, the RSS newsreader plugin for Firefox. In my move, I have tried a few other apps that I thought would be a little better at handling the on-again, off-again nature of me checking my favorite feeds.

I tried Vienna for mac, as it was free, and it worked on my laptop (since I had already packed up the other computers). I liked it fair enough. One of my problems was the keystrokes required to mark all the posts in one feed read, but… aside from that, I had no real problem. (I learned a trick though, the listed keystroke is apple-shift-k, but really, all you have to press is k by itself! Useful, but still on the right hand side… not ergonomic enough.)

Since the PC was the first computer unpacked other than the laptop, I thought that I would give a windows reader a try. I settled on FeedDemon. I like the stuff it does on its own… the type of display, the checking, and the default behavior of folders. The thing I can not stand is the poor usability of the application. The keystroke for marking all feeds in a folder as read is fairly similar to the browser reload… it’s control-shift-r. My brain defaults to that occasionally. The real problem is that it has a separate keystroke for marking all posts in one feed as read, which is control-shift-a. Well, as my brain is hardwired for r, I have pressed that on more than one occasion when trying to mark all posts in a feed as read. What does this do? Well, it marks all posts in the folder I am in as read… and since I imported an OPML feed, it marks all of my feeds as read!!! I’ve already done that at least 5 times. Yes, it is trivial in the grand scheme of life, death, and taxes, but not insignificant for me.

I think that I am likely to go back to Vienna for the moment, with SharpReader (oldie with no bells-or-whistles, but it works the way I would expect) at work. If Vienna can’t convince me pretty soon, I may have to go back to Sage. (Further stating what a great plugin it is).