Pluc Kyx

Review

A review of Plucky X 1.0 (and early beta thereafter) -- Plucky also runs on OS 9, but i haven't tried that.

For a quick 1.0 release, it's great, this is almost the RSS reader i expected when i first understood RSS at all (i'm a greedy user!). I expect it will keep improving as the author, Geoffrey Grosenbach, is actively soliciting user feedback; another good sign -- when i contacted him about a few RSS feeds that wouldn't work, a fix was already available.

The software is also reasonably responsive (vs. SlashDock's slow site-editing window). Speed should be one of the main advantages of a compiled vs. web (e.g. RadioUserland) reader.

When you start it, a window opens with three big buttons on the top: Refetch, Sites, and Prefs. Under that is a list of feeds on the left. Clicking on one will show the headlines from that feed. The first item in the list, "Library", shows the headlines from all of the feeds.

When you first run Plucky, you can set it to automatically grab all your selected feeds; when it's fetching, the Refetch button becomes "Stop" and pressing it stops Plucky from downloading feeds.

Editing the list of sites is easy enough (although in the regex menu, there needs to be some default for the non-technical, or maybe better a guess based on looking at the RSS file). You can set the size of the font in the Preferences.

The filters feature is fantastic. You type in a keyword in the box in the upper right corner of the main window, and get only the items with the keyword in the title. This feature alone makes Plucky worth using. I subscribe to tons of feeds, and can scan everything about, say, wikis, rss, etc. with a few keystrokes.

Wanted

Okay, i've saved most of my wanted features so they wouldn't get in the way of the review of what is there. There's a lot of them, because i spent a lot of time thinking about it. You'll have your favorites, here are my four:

1) Render links (many feeds use HTML); allow resizing of RSS description field box (many feeds have a lot of text here). Option to have it be a third vertical pane instead of being horizontally split (i'd rather read in a narrow column anyway). Maybe even ways to open items or feeds or FeedSets in their own windows.

2) Under the Library, FeedSets rather than individual RssFeeds (just like iTunes' song sets). Some interface is needed to be able to see and organize the feeds in sets. The center window could have a toggle to switch between showing a list of the feeds in the selected FeedSets, and showing a list of all the items in all the feeds in all the FeedSets.

3) Keyboard control -- you can tab among the panes of the main window, good. Here's some possible improvements: have the space bar always "do the right thing" to keep reading -- scrolling down the item if it hasn't gotten to the end; going to the next item otherwise; and going to the next feed if that was the last item in the current feed. Command-. could cancel fetching. Return or enter when on an item could open that item in the web browser. When browsing feeds or FeedSets, a letter keypress could move the selection to the feed or feedset letter pressed (e.g. R to Risks, K to Kuro5hin, etc.). Command-A for Select All would be nice in all of the panes, and the Filter text box.

4) Option to read from and write to external feeds database (via XmlRpc probably?) -- e.g, Radio's subscribed lists. This is to maintain a central library of RssFeeds, FeedSets, and item-read information. You could also have Plucky receive XmlRpc commands necessary to let other RssReaders access Plucky's database.

Here's some more features that would add value, or at least be interesting:

Make the Dock a hierarchical menu (of any FeedSets, not just the whole Library)

AutoBlogging

Refetch selected feeds / FeedSets only

Ability to generate a valid (except perhaps for length) RSS file of one or more FeedSets

Ability to 'attach' a filter to a feed (in Target Sites window) -- so that you can subscribe to overwhelming feeds that you know have occasional gems -- and never see the content except for what you're interested in

Ability to re-order feeds, select more than one at a time (to delete, drag to FeedSets, etc.)

Ability to edit the feeds (name, URL, etc.) in the main window (but not worth it if it's really slow).

Also see RssReaderWanted (in fact, that and this deserve refactoring)