Keith Devens .com

SharpReader is awesome

Ok, SharpReader is freaking awesome. It supports categories, has multi-threaded updating of feeds, and the entry threading feature is amazing. It tells me when someone else I read refers to the post I'm currently reading. Really fantastic. Even more reason to include entire posts in your RSS feeds. People, you listening??

Hopefully I won't wind up hating SharpReader after using it for a little while like I did with the last RSS reader I tried. One good sign is that pieces of SharpReader have grown on me after using it for a little while. For example, the way it keeps old posts around. It works more like an e-mail client, where you have to explicitly delete old items, rather than having them expire in some way. At first I didn't like this. Syndirella kept a configurable number of old items around (I think it defaulted to 50). NewsDesk only kept items around that were in the current feed. After using it though, I think SharpReader does it the best, because posts simply stay around for as long as you want them to. Seems like the best plan to me, even though you do have to explicitly delete old posts (but there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to help you delete a lot of old posts at once ).

Ooh, cool. It exports feeds in the OPML file in the same order as they appear in your SharpReader window. Makes sense, right? Now I don't have to sort my OPML file before displaying it. In fact, now I shouldn't!.

Oh, one feature I want is the ability to "Open in Separate Window" on a feed as well as an individual post. It should really have that.

... Testing how SharpReader notices updated posts. And again...

Permalink | 2 Comments | id 3773

14:25 (utc-4)
edited: 20:15 (utc-4)

Comments

Oh, one feature I want is the ability to "Open in Separate Window" on a feed as well as an individual post. It should really have that.

If you double-click on a feed, it will open it's main page in either the internal browser or in a new window (depending on whether you turned on "open links in external browser" in the options)

I guess I could add a menu-item and keyboard shortcut for this though...

If you double-click on a feed, it will open it's main page in either the internal browser or in a new window (depending on whether you turned on "open links in external browser" in the options)

Yeah, I noticed that. It's good, because it's consistent with what double clicking on items does -- enabling this option would further make it consistent. In addition, if I want to read the main site, I usually want to open it up in my default browser (Mozilla). Plus, I tend to keep the embedded browser window pretty small.

I guess I could add a menu-item and keyboard shortcut for this though...

I'd appreciate it!

Since I know you're listening, a few more things:

Colors for updated item: It'd be nice if I could have updated items highlight in blue (or some other (user-specified?) color), rather than just being in italics, and have the feed title in the tree behave similarly. I really liked how Syndirella did this. If you had updated items but no new ones, the feed title in the left pane turned blue. If you had new and updated items, the feed title would be blue and bold. I'd be happy if you had the title of a feed with only updated items at least be italic instead of bold.
Flagging items: I'd like it if I could flag posts to go back to later, rather than just leaving them unread.
More filtering options: I'd like it if you'd add filtering options for "Show unread", to exclude all read items, and "Show locked", so I could see all the items I have locked. Really, being able to filter for flagged items was the main reason I wanted to be able to flag items. So, if you provided a filter for "Show locked" that would do what I wanted flagged items to do. I think it might make more sense to call items flagged instead of locked, or maybe provide both flagged and locked items, but you get the idea.
Lastly, there's a small bug. If you lock an item and then right click on it, the menu-item is still "Lock item" instead of "Unlock item".

Anyway, thanks for a great program Luke.

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Friday, April 18, 2003

SharpReader is awesome

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