About six months ago I got it into my head that I wanted to play around with RSS technology and see if I could come up with something cool with it. That eventually turned into a standalone RSS reader I wrote for the Mac called TrollDigger. The one feature everyone liked is the ability to view the actual pages instead of the RSS excerpts. I haven’t touched it since then, and the version that’s currently available for download is a bit clunky, but I was thinking about spending a few hours on it this weekend.
To be honest, lately I’ve been thinking about a completely GUI-less RSS reader. I’d like to be able to subscribe to feeds, and simply get Growl notifications when new articles are available. There can be a little drop down in the status bar at the top of the screen that I can click to view new articles if I happen to miss them. Clicking on a Growl balloon would simply spawn Safari with the permalink.
It’s less feature-rich than what TrollDigger currently is, but for some reason I find the simplistic concept sort of appealing. What does everyone else think?
The amount of volume I have would mean that I would either end up with web instances filled with tabs of pages, or I would just miss a ton of things as they scroll by.
Recall that my desktop reader is just for high volume (e.g. Facebook notifications, Drupal code commits) or “private” feeds (e.g. new trouble tickets, Basecamp entries, etc.).
The high volume I can easily have scroll by and just miss, but the “important” private feeds, I kind of need to deal with. Does two categories make sense? Can I config it in such a way that I get a simple list of “important” items that I haven’t read yet? Not sure, but I think you need to think about use cases and what people use it for.
Some good points. TrollDigger already does the Growl notifications anyways, so I could just extend it to take into account feeds that have Growl notifications and ones that don’t. My RSS reader isn’t very high volume as I only subscribe to blogs where I typically read almost all the entries, and I suspect there is a camp of people like me, and another camp more like you.
I’m more in Boris’ camp with a huge volume of feeds that I read at varying levels. I’ve got some I read the second they get updates and others I can go for ages before reading….when the number gets really high, I usually evaluate whether I need to continue to subscribe.
I played with the Google Reader notifier with Growl support and basically had to turn it off since it wasn’t selective about what feeds it let me know were updated so Growl was pretty much always going off.
Now if Trolldigger had some method of flagging or rating the important feeds and only growling those, I’d definitely be interested in checking that out. Of course the main problem I have is that I rarely use the same device to read feeds in a given day (work pc, home desktop, phone, etc) so unless I want to read everything twice or more, I have to use a web based solution.
I think i don’t know what you are talking about!