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.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Me again! The item #1 you mention about the folder organization GUI is completed on our internal builds…as soon as we get it through QA it will be loaded. With any luck it might make it by the end of the week – if not, early next week.
Thanks for the update, Greg!