RSSOwl 1.2 Released

Benjamin Pasero over at RSSOwl.org wrote to tell us that they have released version 1.2 for their RSS/RDF/Atom newsfeed viewer. It looks like a lot of work has gone into this version. Some of the new features are; a fully customizable toolbar with new elements like 'History', new search scopes allow for more detailed searches, a new 'Linked Mode' to update selection in your favorites automatically, support for Atom 1.0 format, and quite a few others.

Honest question - please hear me out.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an honest question and not an attempt to troll or bait. (Posted AC because I fear gettting moded to hell)

What can an RSS/Atom reader do for me?

I have no problem browsing my favorite sites once or twice a day, and enjoy doing so. What am I missing out on?
   

This or bloglines?

[l0rd]

I've just recently discovered bloglines after using firefox & sage to keep up with my many RSS feeds.

Can anyone enlighten me as to if (and if so why) one should be using this instead of bloglines? This is not bashing, I'm just interested into what people use and why.

Re:Why a whole seperate program?

[jacoplane]

To answer my own question, I guess privacy issues could play a role here. If I am subscribing to controversial feeds, I might not want some big corporation to know about that. Still, I think I'd rather run some sort of server-based system on my own box than run this application. Does anyone know if such a system exists?

Re:Is it any faster

[jZnat]

Have you tried Liferea [sf.net]? My favourite feed aggregator and viewer of them all. Fast, lightweight, and sexy.

Cyclical trends

[threedognit3]

In 1970 I use to get 180 column print outs the thickest was about an eighth of an inch. By 1975 I was getting several that were about half inch thick. In 1980 they averaged inch and a half and had grown from four reports to twenty. In 1985 I was getting print outs that average two inches in thickness and the count was up to approximately 30. By 1995 I was getting about 30 daily reports that I would say averaged 2 3/4 inches in thickness. I used about five of them for information. No matter what I did I kept getting those reports. I stored all these reports in an unused room over time. In 2000 we went to desktops and multiple spreadsheets.

In 2003 I got a 'dashboard' that was one screen in size. Within a year it had grown to ten pages.

In 2005 we got RSS and now Atom. I went from 5 websites to numerous.

In all these situations I got lost in the information. after about ten minutes of study I became hopelessly lost and forgot what it was I was trying to understand. A lot of the time the data contradicted itself. In 1999 they removed 1.5 tons of scrap computer print out reports from that storage room (I only used it). At least that's what the guy said who took it.

We call this cyclical trends. In all these years the only thing I've gotten from this is conflicting, confusing and useless information. I got the best information from talking to people.

I really enjoy the simple life.

Interesting icon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone else find the icon [rssowl.org] quite similar to another popular icon [firefox.com]?

Looks ok, but on Windows try this

[Daath]

It looks ok. If you're on windows, though, you should try RSS Bandit [rssbandit.org] - An excellent open source .NET feed reader!

Re:Honest question - please hear me out.

[g0qi]

I have no problem browsing my favorite sites once or twice a day, and enjoy doing so. What am I missing out on?

Most other replies missed one of the advantages most important to me- separation of the data and presentation layer.

There's a great amount of inconsistency on how all these billion sites are designed- CNN, Slashdot, Digg, Washington Post, myriad blogs and so forth. As I jump from one site to the next, it's hard for me to adjust to how they think I should view the data. RSS provides me an easy way to do this. Check out RSS Bandit. They have a common stylesheet for every single RSS feed and you can consume all the data anyway you like it.

Of course, add to that the billion things you can do with just having raw data- like searching, automatically sorting stories by what you consider is relevant and so forth. It takes me half the time to get through my every day digest of information through RSS, than when I used to use the browser. Try it out, you won't be dissapointed.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

While this is nice and all...

[mizidymizark]

maybe this belongs in an Ask Slashdot thread about which RSS reader works best for me. I am sure that RSSOwl is a nice little program, but I would actually prefer a topic to discuss RSS readers in general, such as local client vs. web, feature set, reading web pages in the program versus in the browser, etc.

Re:gmail + reader

[IpalindromeI]

RssFwd [rssfwd.com] or R-Mail [r-mail.org] forwarding to your Gmail account. Done and done.