I’ve been using AmphetaDesk for a few weeks now, but I don’t really like it. The fact that it doesn’t display date/time of the individual items in an RSS 1.0 feed drives me crazy! And I’d prefer that it not show me pages full of items that I’ve already seen.
I tried out Radio UserLand and I’m definitely impressed with the product, but not sure I want to splurge for the 40 bucks quite yet.
So I downloaded FeedReader today and am trying it out. Except for some ugly timezone bugs, I’m pretty impressed. Easy to install, easy to add channels, easy to see what you’ve read and what you haven’t.
Feedreader can be a serious memory hog, and doesn’t respect the refresh times (that’s why it has been banned from Joel Spolsky’s feed). A little glitch is that it doesn’t respect the standard browser (which is Mozilla on my PC) and use IE to launch external links. Meanwhile, it’s the less painful free aggregator I’ve found around there.
Try Aggie: http://bitworking.org/Aggie.html
Open source, displays feeds in a browser, and if you understand XSL, you can easily customize the skins to display anything you want.
Show me an RSS 1.0 feed that is displaying the dates, and I’ll show you in about five minutes how to get AmphetaDesk to show them. All you have to do is modify a single HTML page. It’s mindless modification. As for “pages full of items I’ve already seen”, that’s exactly why AmphetaDesk isn’t a 1.0 product – before it becomes 1.0, it’ll do exactly what you want. Until that time, however, take a look at AmphetaOutlines:
http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/AmphetaOutlines
Are you using the AmphetaOutlines add-on? It makes AD every cooler than it already is. I highly recommend it.
I agree with aggy.
I know it’s not 100% free, but if you use it for chat anyhow, there is a plugin for Trillian Pro that handles RSS feeds very nicely! I use Trillian Pro anyway and couldn’t see myself downloading any other RSS reader.