Further to my posting about searching for the perfect newsreader for RSS feeds, a lot of folk have pointed to the web-based Bloglines. It’s not bad, not bad at all, but I am not on a particularly reliable Internet connection so it is a tad too slow for me.
Nathan of Australian software company Synop, meanwhile, has quietly mentioned their own Sauce Reader, which I have to say on initial impressions looks like an excellent candidate. Indeed, this posting is being composed with it, so why not check it out yourself: Sauce Reader v1.6 is now available for download.
More as I get to play around with it some more, and chat to the creators.
Two missing features from SharpReader that I use all the time:
* hitting enter on an item in the headlines list opens the “link” target of the RSS entry. This is incredibly important for reading feeds that only publish excerpts. The only equivalent I could find in Sauce was a double-click! (mice are evil 🙂 (Right click->open permalink works too).
* hitting space pages down, or moves on to the next (unread) item. The nearest equivalent I could find in Sauce was CTRL+J.
The UI _looks_ nice, but I can’t use it…
Don’t give up on Sauce Reader too soon 😉
1. You can set items with no description to open the link immediately in Sauce Reader. Search the help for “open permalink”. This doesn’t give you the keyboard shortcut, but gives you the desired functionality. Unfortunately we don’t have a menu item for opening the permalink in the Sauce Reader browser so you can’t configure your own keyboard shortcut in this case, we’ll look at adding one.
2. You can change or add a keyboard shortcut for anything that has a menu option in Sauce Reader, including changing the Ctrl-J to Space if you’d like. Search the help for “keyboard shortcut”.
Every feature we have is documented in the help, so if you want something do a quick search. If it’s not there, please drop us a newsgroup message (as you’ve done) so we can add it.
cheers, Nathan