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About a week ago i
noted the arrival of
Plucky (a new Mac-only RSS reader) and now i've had a chance to play with it. The biggest positive is that it's fast -- because it's a normal application, not one you access through your web browser. The biggest negative is that it only shows headlines, not the items' content (often trimmed in RSS feeds, but many items are short enough that it doesn't matter); so you end up having to use your web browser after all. That makes it little better than the OS X Dock-based readers i've noted before (see RssReaders). I wrote the authors and suggested that they show the text of each item, and it sounds likely to be an option in a future release. I wonder why Usenet readers haven't been adapted for RSS, it's a very similar format in some ways.
Other negatives:
- not the most obvious interface for adding new feeds
- no integration with posting to your own weblog (which RadioUserLand? offers -- a button next to each article as you read that automatically creates a new post to your own weblog with the article already pasted in).
- not open source (even though it uses open source code! i'm writing to ask about this)
Other positives:
- If you know regular expressions, you can use it to 'scrape' some sites that don't actually produce RSS feeds!
- Easiy interface to check for feed updates manually, or automatically as often as you want.
- It's still beta, so more features are coming and as noted the authors are responsive to good ideas.