NewsGator

October 27, 2004 · Comments

Been meaning to blog this for a while. I’m having a lazy day. Not in the mood to do anything truly constructive so I’ve spent some time catching up on mailing lists and feeds.

Even though I “initially dismissed it,”:http://www.momathome.com/viewfromhome/software_reviews/bloglines.php I am now thrilled with “NewsGator.”:http://www.newsgator.com I definitely need a web-based subscription thing. That much was a given, considering the multi-platform lifestyle that I’ve adopted (and have been enjoying) this year. I tried “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com for a while, and everyone is raving about it but I read too many feeds. I’d rather collect 100 articles and pick through the ones I’m interested in and throw out the rest than only get a few. And since I tend to read in bursts, a lot of feeds would back up. Bloglines got painfully slow. Spinning beach ball or hourglass of death slowdowns. No matter which machine, no matter which browser so I had to assume the problem was with Bloglines.

One day in September, for the heck of it, I remembered the comment on my entry about NewsGator. Turns out, the comment was from the developer…go figure…didn’t realize it at the time…Hi Greg if you catch this. So I signed up for the 14 day trial, imported my OMPL files and it’s been happiness ever since. It is *fast*. No matter how many feeds I have or how long it has been since I last read, every browser Mac or PC handles it beautifully. Interface-wise, it’s a more pleasant experience than Bloglines. And thanks to a recent burst of funding, the developers are making improvements quickly. The basic service is now free! I have decided to keep paying the $5.95 per month because of the PDA syncing option. If I’m sitting in Starbucks I can catch up on some feeds exactly where I left off on the desktop, come home and when I load up Newsgator in my browser it’s in the exact same spot I left it on the PDA. Unlike Bloglines, reading Newsgator feeds in Pocket IE is fast and easy on the eyes.

The only downside to Newsgator is:

# Organizing feeds into folders is clunky at best. You have to do it in 3 clicks, one feed at a time. I’ve posted this in the support forums and the issue has been acknowledged. I imagine the next interface refresh will address this.
# It’s in an early stage of working with “FeedDemon,”:http://http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/ which is often a more comfortable interface than reading feeds in a browser. I’m just waiting for it to be integrated into “NetNewsWire”:http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ for the Mac. It’s been hinted that it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

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