Filed under: Internet, Text, Windows, Podcasting, Blogging, Freeware
Newzie: not your mama's RSS reader
by Victor Agreda, Jr. Jul 27th 2005 at 9:42PM
My continuing plight with RSS readers has spread to my Windows machine, although I think I've found a pretty cool solution: Newzie. There are a number of unique and cool features that make this RSS reader stand out from an overcrowded and underwhelming crowd. How does color-coding sound?If a news item is about an hour old, it's red. If the news is a stale year ago, it's blue. How very homeland security of them. In NetNewsWire I like to keep my feeds stacked in order of newness, but the color coding is pretty sweet (though a little tough on the eyes after a while). Of course there's the requisite features like tabbed browsing within the app, support for Atom and RSS, content filtering, and you can grab video and audio content. You can also grab pieces and parts of web sites for research or later viewing (web clippings).
Read on for even more goodness...
Another time saver: slide shows. It's a quick way to get through that
ton of unread stuff by just looking at the latest unread in, well, a
slide show. Set up a few criteria, like how long ago you want to see
the unread, and sit back and enjoy. Using left and right arrows you
peruse the news. There's even a handy highlighter.
Besides the reading features there are a couple of ways to alert yourself to news. There's a taskbar notifier, which should be a standard option on any RSS reader (even OSX). And there's a DeskBar mode, which squeezes your feeds into a little scrolling bar on the top of your screen. You see the news scrolling by, along with a search bar.
Speaking of search, there's a great web search tool built in that'll search most major engines all at once. By using a shorthand you can specify a search engine, or even do a specific search, like "yi" for a Yahoo image search. That's a time saver for sure.
All this is free, and only on Windows. Who says Windows apps are uninspired?
Besides the reading features there are a couple of ways to alert yourself to news. There's a taskbar notifier, which should be a standard option on any RSS reader (even OSX). And there's a DeskBar mode, which squeezes your feeds into a little scrolling bar on the top of your screen. You see the news scrolling by, along with a search bar.
Speaking of search, there's a great web search tool built in that'll search most major engines all at once. By using a shorthand you can specify a search engine, or even do a specific search, like "yi" for a Yahoo image search. That's a time saver for sure.
All this is free, and only on Windows. Who says Windows apps are uninspired?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Akabane said 6:04AM on 7-28-2005
Ouch. The interface is a mess ! Too many stuff going on at once. ;)
Seriously : I'm using windows with the start bar on the top of the screen : you just can't use Newzie this way. No window mode, no toolbar management, I can't see the top bar unless I'm changing the way I'm using windows (it's not happening anytime soon). And funny thing : the sidebars are "hidding" on my 2nd monitor when using the option, so dual screen is not an option too. Nice app but it will need a lot of work to work everywhere...
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~J~ said 6:28AM on 7-28-2005
I'm going to wait until I get home to try this (zero download policy at work :( ), but it does look interesting.
It's one of the things I'm extremely jealous over OSX and Linux users as the RSS implementation in those OS's is perfect, but windows just lacks it and the ones that are out there just seem to lack everything but user friendlyness and ease of use!
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Brian Pipa said 8:22AM on 7-28-2005
I've recently switched to GreatNews from http://www.curiostudio.com/ for my RSS reading on Windows. It even integrates with Bloglines!
brian
http://myvogonpoetry.com
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Aaron said 12:19PM on 7-28-2005
All I can say is Disgusting!! Way to cluttered, it almost looks like a game that comes free on cd-rom out of a box of fruit loops. GreatNews looks a lot cleaner from the screenshots. I use Newsfire at home (OS X) but since I play a windows user at work I have yet to find anything that can compare to Newsfire or Netnewswire on OS X.
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wormeyman said 3:12PM on 7-28-2005
I agree with the first poster the interface is a mess and has no tooltips when hovering oversomething and wondering what it does. I use RSS bandit and while i really like it, it does not scale very well at all :(
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Richard said 9:32AM on 8-04-2005
I tried Newzie, and it's pretty difficult to use. The item prioritization and color coding is nice, but it's so hard to add new feeds that it's not really worth it to me. I using Pluck right now: http://www.pluck.com/
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