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 way (( till the promised Google Reader integration arrives that is )). 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.