I am dumbfounded at this point. I love RSS; I love the all the news at your fingertips ability it gives you. However, I hate RSS readers. Every single one I’ve tried has had a feature that really turned me off to it. I’ve tried a lot of news readers and there is always something about them. Be it a system resource hog, a pop-up production system, or just down right not fun to use.
Google Reader was a possible player but lets face it; I’m not going to sit there all day with a browser window open. I want a program running in the background actively telling me about significant events. The one thing I really did like about Google Reader was the Gods-eye view of the news that it gave you on the main page. All the recent news stacked up and aggregated in one place.
What I look for in a news reader hasn’t been found yet. I want a slim program with not too many whistles and bells; easy on system resources. I want the ability to highly organize a myriad of feeds and get the overall Gods-eye view or mere sub-section Lords-eye view. I also would like the ability to set notifications up on a per feed or per sub-section basis. Meaning that I don’t want hundreds of notification boxes filling up my screen every five minutes. I want notification boxes when I ask for them; no sooner, no later.
I haven’t been using a reader on a daily basis for quite some time now. I think it’s obvious by my lack of writing. Right now, I’m configure Outlook 2007 for RSS reading but it appears to be more of the same stuff I don’t want. At least it’s built in to my e-mail program (and yes, I’ve tried Thunderbird and despised it).
Apparently, I’m asking for too much. I’m not a programmer or I’d write it myself, GPL it, and be on my merry little way. I’ve yet to find one newsreader that can give me what I want. Any ideas?
[tags]rss, feed reader, newsreader, feeds[/tags]
