Keith Devens .com

NewsDesk sucks

Ok, I didn't want to say anything publicly, because David seems like a nice guy and I didn't want to hurt his feelings. But this program was yet another case where the problems aren't really obvious until you've used the program for a while.

NewsDesk is almost unusable for me now -- I don't even want to check my feeds anymore -- and I'm eagerly awaiting when Luke fixes SharpReader to work on Windows 98. I'm even considering expediting upgrading to Windows XP so that I can have a usable RSS reader again.

Before I give my list of things that don't work in NewsDesk, I just want to make clear that it's possible that these problems don't exist on Windows XP. Like SharpReader, it's possible that it suffers from bugs particular to Windows 98. With that said:

Problems with NewsDesk:

• For a large portion of my feeds, NewsDesk completely forgets what's been read, and just markes the entire contents of the feed new every time. So, that's really annoying. It kind of defeats the purpose of monitoring the feeds for changes.
• For whatever reason, on a large portion of my feeds, when I click to view the feed, NewsDesk throws an exception. I have no clue why, I haven't noticed any pattern. So, having an exception pop up in your face every few seconds when you're working your way through your feeds doesn't make you want to use the program much.
• NewsDesk doesn't do a good job of ignoring problems in feeds. I have a bunch of feeds with a red folder icon, meaning that NewsDesk couldn't read the feed.
• Worst of all, however, is that if NewsDesk has a problem updating a feed, for instance, if updating the feed times out, it gets stuck. So none of your feeds past that get updated. You can't even right click on a feed and click "Get New Headlines" because it still considers itself in the middle of an update process. And the "cancel" button doesn't do anything. It claims it's cancelling the feed update, but that gets stuck too. Right now, my NewsDesk status bar says "Canceling update...", and it has for a long time. So you have to restart the program to get it to start over, and if it gets stuck again (maybe the site is down), you're screwed. This makes the program almost useless, because it seems to happen frequently.

So Luke, help me out here.

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18:55 (utc-4)