RSS Round-up: SharpReader and FeedReader FeedReader Forrest Stroud
FeedReader
Our second RSS reader, FeedReader, looks and functions in a similar fashion to SharpReader, with a few key differences. Most importantly, FeedReader packages an installer and doesn't require .NET v1.1 to run, making it by far the easier of the two readers to get up and running with. FeedReader also features built-in access to three major feed syndicators, each of which offers hundreds of available RSS feed sources, making the process of finding and subscribing to new feeds as siple as possible.
In addition to supporting all major RSS formats, including v0.9, v0.91, v1.0, and v2.0, FeedReader also supports various RSS extensions such as Dublin Core and Slashback.
FeedReader offers a choice of displays for viewing RSS feeds. The News Overview option presents the more traditional three-pane display, complete with a preview pane for viewing RSS feed entries or their accompanying web pages. The Aquarium View does away with the feedslist pane as well as the headline pane, leaving only the preview pane and an address bar with back and forward buttons for navigating between feed entries.
While FeedReader doesn't offer SharpReader's drag and drop feed subscription capabilities, it does make subscribing to new feeds easy. Users can simply cut and paste RSS URLs into FeedReader or can directly type the URLs into the program's address bar. Alternatively, users can simply select from the hundreds of available RSS feeds offered by the three referenced syndicators.
Numerous configuration options are available via the Properties menu item, covering a variety of display options and program tweaks, although we would have preferred to see additional options for displaying the date and time information in a more readable format. While the main toolbar only offers three buttons by default, it can easily be customized, so we quickly added essential buttons like subscribe and mark feeds read via the customize command.
Additional features in FeedReader include feed search capabilities, taskbar alerts for incoming feeds, proxy server support, headline caching for offline viewing, one-click subscription of Radio Userland and AmphetaDesk feeds, and multilingual support. Noticeably absent relative to SharpReader are filtering capabilities and threading support.
An important addition in the latest version of FeedReader is OPML (Outline Processor Mark-up Language) import and export functionality, making it possible to share your news feeds with other users and to transfer subscribed feeds across different RSS readers.
