RSS Bandit is my new RSS aggregator.Yep. I just downloaded the latest build and decided that I'm gonna stick with it. I love sharpreader, but there's just too many features missing from it to me.
What I like about RSS Bandit:
- For starters, I can now start flagging away posts I find interesting so that I can blog about them at a later date(SR also has a "lock item" function, but it's just not the same). The nice thing is that there are several types of "flags" such as "read", "forward" and so on. Anyway, it's cool and I like it.
- Second of all, the interface usability has been enhanced and the "feature" that used to halt the program when ever feed updates would be processed is now only a small glitch every now and again. Much better.
- Third, I can post comments from within the program(to most blogs)
- Fourth, it's gonna have Search Folders
- Fifth, You can customize the appearance of a post from some nice looking XSLT renderers
- Sixth, it has Tabbed browsing and a hideaway feed tree
These were the features I like. Here's what I'm missing:
- The Feed tree can only be widened to a certain extent. Why is that?
- Posting to my blog from it
- a "blog about this item" feature which automatically asks you what parts of the item you'd like to be inserted into the new blog post (title,author name, quoted text...)
- I can't wait for the search folders!
- Pressing space while reading a long blog post does not scroll the explorer pane of the post(unless it is focused), but automatically takes you to the next unread post. I wish that would behave like SR where it would scroll the post until it ends and only then take you to the next one
- I wish there was an ability to choose whether you can order the feed tree alphabetically or by a distinct order the user wants (like SR)
- For some reason, some of the posts are blue and some not. What does that mean?
- I'd like to know how far down the feed list is the updating process when I press the "update all feeds" (a simple XX feeds left to update should do)
- Why is there a whole panel just for search when all there is is just a small text box? Why not simply put that box on the main tool bar?
- While we're at it, entering text in the search box and pressing enter should automatically run search( i.e the Search Button should be the default button when the text box is active)
- I'd like to be able to set the default update rate for a category(which will impact all feeds in it) and not just for the whole feeds globally using the main options dialog
- NO RSS aggregator I've seen yet has been able to do this simple task: in the main .Net weblogs feed, show the name of the post author\Blog name next to the post title. Is this information simply missing from the feed? If not, how hard would it be to implement this?
- I'd like to be able to setup the viewer pane to the right, and the posts pane to the bottom left (like in outlook's 2003 default view or like FeedDemon)