Balaji’s Blog

Reading RSS on your desktop – free and easy

I made a brief mention about the feed-reader I’ve settled on in my earlier blog post, but decided to spend a little more time fleshing out my impressions of GreatNews.

By default, GreatNews starts up with a two-pane interface

Each of the folders is called a “Channel” and provides a quick way to see all the articles under that particular Channel:

As you can see, I have 3 feeds in that particular category (from the ever awesome Metafilter). By selecting the category, I can see all the unread items at one go. This is similar to what Google Reader offers today. One small quibble I have right now with this is that when you move away from a category, the items aren’t marked as read. But if you were to move from one feed to another, GreatNews automatically marks that feed as read correctly.

GreatNews offers tabbed browsing, allowing you to quickly open multiple articles in the background while you keep reading. By default though, GreatNews uses the IE rendering engine . Firefox cannot be used without installing the Firefox ActiveX plugin (gah!), so I just have GreatNews setup to open all links in my default browser.

By default, GreatNews is configured to display all items in the RSS feed but that can be changed using the filtering options:

I was kinda hoping that Show All would be a toggle filter, i.e., you click Show All once to display read items and then click it once more to switch back to the “filtered” view. That doesn’t happen though (pity) so you have to select Unread from the dropdown once-more to go back.

Greatnews supports various “styles” for viewing news items – these are essentially CSS stylesheets and can be easily modified if you don’t like the default selections:

You can find user-created styles on the Greatnews forums, but frankly I found the “Simple” style to work best across all my feeds (YMMV obviously).

GreatNews offers the ability to “tag” various articles for further reading – it calls them labels. One thing to note is that right now, choosing to mark all feeds as read will reset your labels as well – obviously if you have were planning to read some long posts at a later date this can be a problem. When I raised this issue on the forums, the author told me a new type of label was being developed that lets you “archive” posts and will not be affected by the “mark all as read” option.

Where GreatNews really shines in comparision to online Feed Readers is tight integration with various online and offline tools:

For example, I have configured GreatNews to work with Windows Live Writer (which I what I am using to write this blog post), which means I get to use all the features of a rich blog editor without having to actually leave my RSS reader – neat!

The Tools screenshot above lists another feature of GreatNews – which is NewsWatches. I haven’t used this at all so far, but essentially it allows you to setup a search for certain key words in your subscriptions. It will pull together articles from different feeds based on your keywords and display it one place after each update.

GreatNews is portable, so if you want to you can install it on a thumbdrive and take your feeds with you that way¹. The application is fairly light as well (right now, it’s using about 18MB of RAM on my system).

Other Features:

1. Since this is an offline feed-reader, you can choose to read your feeds offline (duh) – Google Reader is now offering this thanks to Google Gears.

2. Your feeds database can be cleaned up whenever you think it has bloated to keep the disk usage down. However, infrequently updated feeds or feeds with bad time-stamps can be entirely purged by this cleanup, resulting in spurious unread counts. You can avoid this by manually excluding those feeds from the cleanup process.

3. GreatNews will identify feeds that haven’t been updated in 60 days (by default, you can change that if you want to) and let you delete those feeds if you choose to do so.

4. You can get a Feed Activity report if you are a statistics-geek (and which self-respecting geek isn’t? )

5. Feed Subscriptions can be imported / exported via OPML files. Always needed if you are planning to switch from one reader to another.

6. GreatNews doesn’t have an API, but all data is stored in an SQLite database, so there are ways to extract data from your feeds for mashups.

So there you have it – GreatNews offers almost all the functionality that a typical online feed reader would give you but with intergration to offline tools as well. The author of the software is open to suggestions and is pretty quick about pushing out updates.

If you are looking for an offline news reader that does the job for free, GreatNews should definitely at the top of your list.

1. till the promised Google Reader integration arrives that is [↩]

iTunes for the rest of us

If you have decided to stay away from the cult of the iPod (like I have), your biggest headache typically is getting your songs onto the player.

That’s not to say that the software supplied with your player doesn’t work, but I suppose you could say a monocycle works as well.. in a fashion

The usual complaints?

• A horrible interface that makes it almost impossible to do anything but just view songs.
• No additional functionality that might make it easier for you to add metadata to your collection – for example, freedb lookup
• No functionality to find duplicates or missing tracks, or volume-level your collection
• Poorly implemented playlist functionality
• No podcasting support

All of which those fancy iPod users get in one shiny package thanks to iTunes¹. So what do us poor cousins do?

Well you could try MediaMonkey. What do I love about it?

• Superb functionality for tagging and organizing your songs – I managed to add artist, track, year and album art to my entire collection of some 2000+ songs in one afternoon – how freaking amazing is that?
• Really once you have everything properly organized, everything else just falls into place – for example, finding duplicates. MM does volume leveling, both run-time and permanent
• MM can use Winamp as its player plus most plugins that work with Winamp work with MM also.
• It can create smart playlists. The pro version allows for more advanced smart playlists, but the basic functionality exists even if you don’t go pro
• Out of the box, MM supports pretty much every type of MP3 player out there – Creative and/or any Playsforsure device, iRiver, iPod and the USB drive MP3 players. If you have an older player, you might still be able to transfer songs, but not playlists. YMMV.
• The only downside so far – it doesn’t do podcasts².

The best part of all this – MediaMonkey is free. Yup, no time limited trial, no spyware, no pop-ups. All that functionality I’ve just talked about is available for anyone who downloads the standard version. Awesome!

It might not have the visual appeal of iTunes, but MM gets the job done, and it does it well. And suddenly, joining the “i ain’t no white earbuds slave” movement just got simpler.

powered by performancing firefox

1. Why other MP3 player manufacturers don’t get this point is something I’ll discuss in another post [↩]
2. though the next version of MM will, and there is a plugin available in the forums that adds podcasting support [↩]

Program Virtualization for everyone

It has always been a problem for me that I go through certain phases of rapidly installing and uninstalling software when looking for a good utility.

Typically that means lots and lots of registry entries that never get cleaned out and eventually my PC grinds to a halt, forcing me to spend 2 days on reformatting and reinstalling.

I read about SVS on Lifehacker today and it seems like an extremely useful solution.

A free virtualization program that traps all changes made by a program in a separate layer, allowing you to keep your base OS clean. Uninstalling is as simple as deactivating a “layer” and voila! all files and registry settings disappear.

You can read more about SVS in this lifehacker article.

Download it here.