Merlin::Blog

The new flock is almost a great RSS reader

merlin | 05 May, 2008 20:50

So I've been hunting for my perfect RSS reader for years now, I think I've tried all of them, but can't find one that meets all of my requirements:

View available for unread articles only - this one should be obvious, and is the highest priority.
Support for grouping feeds into folders/tags (also obvious)
When viewing a folder, display all articles contained in that folder
OPML support (import/export)
Ability to somehow know if articles have been read on another device

online-only platforms are not the only solution to this one

Ability to post a blog entry based on an article
Ability to set per-feed and per-folder expiration ages

for example: A folder of press articles can be expired after 2 days, while a facebook feed should never expire, and a feed from slickdeals.net can expire after a couple of hours.
Akregator does this

Ability to share articles as public bookmarks
Smart folder support (a highly underrated feature)
Bayesian matching for setting priority of articles
Present all articles in selected folder/feed with a single view (as opposed to a list of headlines w/ a single article pane)
The ability to view articles in a compressed (one line per article) format - partial content in addition to headlines (good for twitter feeds)
Pull linked article content when no content is provided in the feed
The ability to display enclosures inline
For web-based readers, the abilty to host it on a personal server.
The ability to read articles on a mobile device

I've tried many readers with many combinations of these features - none with all. Flock does many of my favorite of these - however I don't understand one that it doesn't. It doesn't seem to have an unread articles view per folder, just the myworld widget (It's the first reader I've seen without it). Other than that, here's what I would like to see the most in it. Anyhow, I love the speed, and I love the blog support. It's also one of the most attractive readers that I've seen. Personally, I'm thinking my best bet is some web-based reader, but right now I haven't seen one that does all of these things. But in lieu of my previous favorite (akregator) Flock may be the replacement.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: Updatebleh