I’m trying out NewsGator, which I hear has been recently updated, to read my RSS feeds. I’m about ready to wash my hands of it and uninstall it, but I thought see what other people think of it.
You only have to look at the About page to see that I’m quite fond of free software. It was a major leap for me to even consider paying for an application to replace the free and quite suitable Bloglines that I’ve been using for years.
One thing I’ve never liked about Bloglines is the all-or-nothing style of reading posts. I’ll be honest, I’m not always diligent about keeping up with my blog reading. Sometimes the blogs end up with a hundred or so unread posts. There’s no suitable way for me to read, say, five of those posts and leave the rest unread for another time. There is a “Keep New” checkbox, but every click is a browser refresh and I just don’t like it.
NewsGator puts the RSS posts into Outlook and I can ignore them like do all my email. Also, they have this service that syncs what I read in Outlook with what I can access from NewsGator Online. One of the reasons I’ve never considered a desktop RSS reader is because I want to be able to read from any computer. I thought $20 per year was pretty reasonable for that service and you get a year free when you purchase the software ($30, I think).
So why uninstall it? I have three major problems and a few minor ones. First, NewsGator Online takes about five times longer to aggregate feeds in Firefox than it does in IE. I’m not switching to IE just for an RSS reader. When I’m reading online, I can’t see any images in the posts. In Firefox, I get nothing. In IE, I see my old friend the red X. Finally, some posts from j-walkblog.com simply did not show up in Outlook. That’s kind of an important one, I think.
There are some minor annoyances too, but many of them are Outlook annoyances. One of the minor ones deals with images in the Outlook posts. I have to add the feed’s domain to my Trusted Zone in IE to see images. It’s a pain and NewsGator should have an option to do that automatically, but I could live with it. If they would fix those big three, I’d probably pony up the dough.
I should also note that their support pages suck eggs. I typed some carefully selected search terms in their forum search box and got 500 results that weren’t related to my search terms. Then I typed complete gibberish into the search box and got 500 results that weren’t related to my search gibberish. It was neither supportive nor helpful.
Does anyone else use it and have an opinion to share?
If you’re using Firefox check out the Wizz RSS 2.1.2 extension at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/424/
I tried NewsGator too and ran into most of the same problems, and others, that you did. And like you I used Bloglines but was annoyed at losing posts because I couldn’t save them as new easily.
For an email based feed aggregator try http://www.squeet.com I’ve used it for about 4 months and love it. No ads (for now) and it’s free.
Regards,
Tom
I use and love omea reader.
|| One thing I’ve never liked about Bloglines is the all-or-nothing style of reading posts. I’ll be
|| honest, I’m not always diligent about keeping up with my blog reading. Sometimes the blogs end up
|| with a hundred or so unread posts. There’s no suitable way for me to read, say, five of those
|| posts and leave the rest unread for another time. There is a “Keep New” checkbox, but every click
|| is a browser refresh and I just don’t like it.
I agree. What I’ve ended up doing is clicking on the “Mark All New” item at the top of the page, it’s usually pretty easy to get back to where I was by just using the “j” keyboard shortcut to skip each item I’ve already seen.
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To branch off onto a related topic — IMO, what’s really needed is a single “reader” that can be customized as one wants for reading everything. It would be a portal to the various data sources — news items, rss feeds, blogs, email, forums (how many different implementations of forum software are there?), usenet, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, etc. But all of the functions, keyboard shortcuts, etc. are the same because we’re using the same window on different sources of data.
Some of the big advantages of older usenet/Genie/CompuServe readers ignored by similar software today:
ability to easily ignore threads and/or authors
ability to flag messages/threads of interest by “importance”
ability to use a single key to read through everything (e.g. space bar to scroll message, if at end of message, move to next message, if at end of current forum, skip to first message of next forum, etc)
ability to easily skip to next message, next thread, next board/forum, etc.
One reason I settled on Bloglines over some of the other RSS readers is they’ve implemented some of these features (the “j” and “s” keyboard shortcuts allow quickly skipping over items of no iterest).
Curious. On Bloglines do you set up groups? Or are you talking that one feed can have 100 or more posts? I have multiple groups/folders set up loosely by category, with a few such as your feed in a group that I consider “work safe”.
I don’t bother with the Jwalk feed. He is too consistent with posting, and there are a lot of posts each day so it was overwhelming me to view them through Bloglines. I find it quicker to just go to his website every night. That’s about the only site that has a feed that I do that for anymore.
The biggest reason I like Bloglines is once you click on a category, all the posts are displayed without having to go into each one to read it. I’m assuming the readers that set up Outlook messages will require a lot more clicking to read, then delete each one.
I bought Newsgator Outlook Edition (now Newsgator Inbox) a couple of years ago and haven’t looked back.
I can’t speak towards your problems with Firefox, but with IE I’ve had no problems getting images in posts.
As far as Newsgator Inbox, the best way to get support is to click on the Newsgator Inbox toolbar and select “Submit Support Request to Newsgator” along with info on the feed your having trouble with. They’ve helped me with a couple of trouble feeds in the past. Maybe they can help with the Trusted IE Zone thing as well as I don’t have to set mine as trusted. But my Zone is already at a Custom level, so who knows if our settings are the same to begin with.
Here’s why I love Newsgator:
1) I read/subscribe/delete a feed on the web, in Outlook, on my phone (usually use this feature when waiting in a doctors office or something like that), or on my Media Center PC and the result is synced accross all devices.
2) In Newsgator Inbox, with a feed to something like Gizmodo which has 40 posts a day, I can quickly scan the messages for something I’d like to read (by subject line) and quicky delete the things I don’t just like an email.
3) This is a big one. There’s an awesome stylesheet plugin for Inbox called Fetchlinks:
http://graemef.com/?q=project/fetchlinks
It will go the full post into Inbox from feeds that generally only send accross the first paragraph or so. Very useful.
-Jeremy
That last sentence should read.
It will get the full post into Inbox from feeds that generally only send accross the first paragraph or so. Very useful.
I’d like to ask a question that will probably make me look like an idiot. If I mark a post as read on Newsgator Online, does the post still download into Outlook? That is, were those “missing” posts really posts that I already marked as read on Newsgator Online? If so, that makes perfect sense although it’s not the behavior I’d like.
Sorry, but I wanted to test coComment on your blog.
And now I have. :-)
A couple of responses:
Dick –
The idea of having an option to tell NewsGator Inbox to automatically add a feed’s domain to your Trusted Zone in IE is an interesting idea and I will look into it as a feature request.
As far as marking a post as read in Online – by default that post will not be downloaded into Outlook. You can change this by doing the following:
1. Click on “Options” in the NewsGator Inbox dropdown menu
2. In the Options dialog, click on the “Retrieval” tab
3. Find the checkbox labeled “Retrieve only unread items” and uncheck it
Now if you read a post in NewsGator Online it will still be downloaded into Outlook, but will not be marked as unread.
Jeremy –
The functionality that FetchLinks gives you is actually built into NewsGator Inbox 2.6. This forum post explains how to use this feature.
Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks Nick and everyone else. I’ve decide to go through the rest of the trial and monitor the performance with Firefox.
Nick,
Not sure how I missed the new feature in 2.6. even after beta testing! Thanks.
Oh, and you guys should check out coComments.com. I created a page for myself. Subscribed to my own RSS feed and get updates when people post comments to the blogs I’ve commented on. I probably would have never gotten Nick’s comment without it. Sweet.
Like you, my biggest complaint with Bloglines was the “all-or-nothing” “feature.” You’d think they would have fixed that “bug” by now — I can’t believe there’s anyone who finds it useful. I only read Bloglines on my Palm TX — it has a *free* “mobile” version. I tried Newsgator once (online and for Outlook), but it just didn’t do it for me. There are so many other, equally capable, free readers out there.
For the most part, I use Sage in Firefox — and have for about 2 years, now. It’s very basic, but it flies and does most of what I need it to do. I also own, and sometimes use, Onfolio (since it works in IE and Firefox) — unfortunately, most of the time Onfolio is slow as molassis (sp?). Onfolio was bought by Microsoft a few weeks ago and it’s now a “free” plugin for Live Toolbar (or whatever they’re calling it this week). It still works with Firefox, but it’s no longer officially supported with Firefox, natch.
Before Sage, I used RSSBandit — a free, standalone reader. I just downloaded the current version to take another look at it. I really like Sage, but lately Firefox has been really flakey on me (I’ve actually been trying Maxthon lately to see if it’s any more stable than FF) — and FF is an awful memory hog. The latest version of RSSBandit looks really nice.