Eddie Welker.com

I am a big fan of Sage, the RSS newsreader plugin for Firefox.  In my move, I have tried a few other apps that I thought would be a little better at handling the on-again, off-again nature of me checking my favorite feeds.

I tried Vienna for mac, as it was free, and it worked on my laptop (since I had already packed up the other computers).  I liked it fair enough.  One of my problems was the keystrokes required to mark all the posts in one feed read, but… aside from that, I had no real problem.  (I learned a trick though, the listed keystroke is apple-shift-k, but really, all you have to press is k by itself!  Useful, but still on the right hand side… not ergonomic enough.)

Since the PC was the first computer unpacked other than the laptop, I thought that I would give a windows reader a try.  I settled on FeedDemon.  I like the stuff it does on its own… the type of display, the checking, and the default behavior of folders.  The thing I can not stand is the poor usability of the application.  The keystroke for marking all feeds in a folder as read is fairly similar to the browser reload… it’s control-shift-r.  My brain defaults to that occasionally.  The real problem is that it has a separate keystroke for marking all posts in one feed as read, which is control-shift-a.  Well, as my brain is hardwired for r, I have pressed that on more than one occasion when trying to mark all posts in a feed as read.  What does this do?  Well, it marks all posts in the folder I am in as read… and since I imported an OPML feed, it marks all of my feeds as read!!!  I’ve already done that at least 5 times.  Yes, it is trivial in the grand scheme of life, death, and taxes, but not insignificant for me.

I think that I am likely to go back to Vienna for the moment, with SharpReader (oldie with no bells-or-whistles, but it works the way I would expect) at work.  If Vienna can’t convince me pretty soon, I may have to go back to Sage.  (Further stating what a great plugin it is).