Ok first lesson in blogging, get your facts sorted. I started writing this entry with a long list of bugfixes and feature requests for my common RSS readers. But then I went to the sites for PocketRSS and Blogmatrix Sparks! and realised that they both have upgraded there versions and I just was not keeping up to date. But on the PocketRSS front its not my fault because they dont have RSS feeds on the site. Oh dear oh dear! Anyhow, here's my list of features…
- In PocketRSS, theres seems to be no way to import linked OPML files. For example my IanForresterfeeds link to my other OPML files. luckily Sparks! does which is great
- In PocketRSS, there seems to be no way to automatically reload opml subscriptions without doing it yourself. It would be great for it to happen every X days or everytime you start PocketRSS.
- In Sparks, is it only me or is help needed in Sparks! I still dont quite know the differences between “Add this OPML directory to Sparks!” and “Import every weblog in this OPML directory”?
- In PocketRSS, there seems to be no way marking a whole RSS feed read. And on top of that theres no way to do this to multiple RSS feeds. At the moment you need to go into the RSS feed and mark each entry as read.
- In Sparks, what is the difference between the blue sphere global things and the podcast and weblog sections? When I import a OPML file shouldnt it automaticly work out what a podcasting feed is and what a normal feed is? Jager already does this, why not sparks?
- In Sparks, how on earth do you actually delete a ton of feeds in one go? I right click on the containing folder and the Remove category is always greyed out. And following on from that, hitting delete key should do the same as right clicking and selecting delete right? Wrong!
- In Sparks, is there anyway to stop Sparks using IE as the default browser for displaying blogs? On top of that, is there way to force it to use a external browser like Jager does?
- Generally about PocketRSS, why does searching under google for PocketRSS still take me the old site? And the old site still points to PocketRSS 1.42 rather than the nice new PocketRSS 2.x. A simple redirect should do the trick AtomicDB guys
- With Sparks and Jager, why is the licence attached to a indivdual machine? I have jager installed on 4 machines I use every week. Couldnt the licence be attached to myself rather than the client?
- With Sparks/jager and somewhat PocketRSS, as mentioned above I have Jager running on 4 different machines. There needs to be some kind of attention data between them soon, otherwise its going to be unmanageable. I read a feed on one of them and then switch to another client. I then have to manually tell the 2nd client I already read that entry or feed. This is nuts when your using 4 clients and then add in the fact I'm using 2 other RSS readers, PocketRSS and Sage. Yes this is CRAZY! Please can some one start using Attention.xml please! Theres a GAP IN THE MARKET here for someone to setup a nice webdav service which could sync attention.xml across multiple RSS clients. Blogmatrix this would be ideal for you guys!
Of course I'm not knocking any of these pieces of software, I actually bought PocketRSS a while ago and am considering buying Jager (Sparks! still doesnt fit with my style of rss reading).