I recently sent the guys at
blogmatrix a email asking whats going to happen to
Jaeger in the light of
Sparks! I use Jaeger everyday because it pretty much does what I really need a
RSS reader to do. It stays out of the way of my browsing and allows me to glance over many feeds (almost 250 now) very quickly while working away. Its not perfect however, there are bugs like the sync bug which ignores your proxy server settings. So I cant sync my work machine with my laptop and home machine. There are also lots of little things I would love to add if I was a python hacker, like more search engines, send via email (generates a email with the link, title and small description already written), post to blog or del.icio.us and output xml/rss. I'm almost able to hack this together myself except its a XML or XHTML only affair. There seems to be no way to have both. The templates are luckly velocity templates but there seems to be no way to specify other templates Jaeger should server up. On that same vein, I'm not able to get Jaeger to serve up HTML outside of the local machine. Not sure if this a constraint, bug or something I'm doing wrong. Anyhow, here's the email, I'll be interested in what others feel.
Hi David and others,
Quite a while ago I wrote in regards to Jaeger support and what's going to happen to it? I just wanted to ask again, with all the support and push for Sparks, I'm wondering if Jaeger would ever make it to a version 2? I understand the development and time constraints attached to having 2 products Jaeger and sparks.
Dont get me wrong, I like Sparks! But its well over kill for myself, there are also some things which have been lost in the transformation.
* Single Panel (works with my standard browser)
* Offline/bulk reading seems better in Jaeger
* Synchronization! (This is a lifesaver when working with 3 Jaegers clients, I even got my pocket pc rss client to read the stored OPML every week now!)
* Universal Search Engine (I'm actually hacking around with Python to add support for A9 and others)
If Sparks had all these I would upgrade, but it strikes me that Jaeger and Sparks are different products and thats a good thing. So in light of this and the development effort, I wonder if you had ever considered,
* Open sourcing Jaeger or making it more open at least (if I was a python programmer I would love to re-engineer Jaeger, right now my XHTML+CSS templates are custom to my preferences which is the best I can currently do. But I had thought about hacking Jaeger into outputting XML which I could then transform into a Konfabulator widget, screensaver or something else)
* Releasing a version without the licence nag? (Now sparks is free, shouldnt Jaeger be too? I believe you were charging $30 per client for Jaeger a while ago?)
* Make a donate Jaeger version (I would be happy to donate to Jaeger but not pay $30 for each version of Jaeger I install on my many machines)
Anyway, I hope you understand this isn't an attack of Blogmatrix, I personally think Jaeger is great and still beats some of the mature rss readers like blogbridge, feeddemon, etc. But I'm left pondering what future it has everytime I get the licence nag. Plus there are bugs in Jaeger which seem to be fixed in Sparks but I'm unsure there ever make it to Jaeger ever
I recieved a email from David Janes from Blogmatrix after a couple of hours.
Hi Ian,
The source code for Jaeger is available on sourceforge, if you'd like to
play with it. I'd be more than willing to offer help as time allows.
FYI: Our llicense agreement says it can't be rereleased without the nag
unfortunately.
So it looks like Jaeger will be supported but its going to take lots of time and resources from the blogmatrix guys, till then I'm hoping some open souce developers pick it up and do some interesting things with the code. Yep a little lazyweb but hey theres nothing wrong with that.
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