Late to the Party

I was going to post a comment about GreatNews and RSS Bandit in response to Shannon (creator of Feedlinx) under my blog entry about Feedlinx. But I thought it would be better to make the comment into a blog entry so that more readers can see the initial impressions I have about the two RSS readers without having to dig through comment threads.  Both RSS readers earn points with me because they're freeware, yet they both have a lot of great features that are similar or surpass features on commercial/shareware RSS reader software.   I'm actually more inclined to buy/donate to software companies who offer their applications for free…but let's not get into a debate about that.

I'm grateful to Shannon for mentioning GreatNews. I did a quick search for the developer's site and checked out the application. Its feature of displaying the stories in a more newspaper-like layout was intriguing, so I installed the app and tried it out. It is very nice! I love the different layout styles (there are more than one) that use two columns, making the "river of news" look more newspaper-like. Very cool for reading RSS feeds in slate mode on my tablet. Actually, the different styles available are just CSS files, so you could create your own. I already saw a couple posted on the discussion forum for GreatNews at the developer's site. This might just push me to learn some CSS to create my own styles.

At first I was going to take away a point or two from GreatNews because it seemed like there was no way to view the feed headlines, in case I didn't feel like viewing the stories in a "river of news" layout, but I figured out that I just needed to enable viewing the "News List" under the View menu. I liked how RSS Bandit could either display news stories in the "river of news" format (which I often prefer), or as a list of headlines, like a list of e-mails in your e-mailbox that you can click on and preview individually. So I was glad that GreatNews has the same feature.

Both GreatNews and RSS Bandit have tabbed browsing if you want to use the internal web browser to view links from the stories, but I set both of them up to bring up links Firefox instead (too dependent on mouse gestures and such). Both RSS reader programs somehow know to open up a Gmail window in Firefox, rather than try to open a dormant installation of Outlook Express (awesome!).

In actuality, both GreatNews and RSS Bandit have a lot of similar features, but they trade off with the more interesting features. RSS Bandit allows you to comment on a feed entry if certain comment protocols are supported. GreatNews can track comments as an RSS feed, given certain circumstances/support. RSS Bandit supports Usenet newsgroups. GreatNews uses tagging to keep track of feed entries you want to save (very Web 2.0), while RSS Bandit uses the more conventional "flagging" of an item to save it for later.

I haven't fully explored either program, but for right now, GreatNews's nice "river of news" layouts are winning me over. Perhaps in a week or two I can post a follow-up to see which one eventually "wins"…until I find another RSS reader to try out. (The centralized "syncing" service that Feedlinx offers would make trying out new RSS readers a lot easier…note to self to enter my "essential" feeds into Feedlinx sometime soon!)  In the meantime I suggest you check out each program's feature lists (GreatNews here and RSS Bandit here) and try them out yourselves. If anyone has any comments, or new suggestions for RSS readers I should try, please post in response to this entry.

Last week I decided to try out a standalone RSS reader application again, to see how it would compare to using an online RSS reader (mainly so that if Rojo or whatever online feed reader I'm using goes down, or has some maintenance issues, I have a "backup"). In the process of trying to find a decent freeware RSS reader — I decided on RSS Bandit; will blog about it separately later — I found out about this free service called Feedlinx. It is not a typical online feed reader service like Rojo or Bloglines. If you use it one way, you can essentially convert your RSS feeds to automatic e-mail lists (you can control the frequency of the e-mails).

However, the more interesting way of using Feedlinx is to sync up the read/unread status of your feeds with any RSS reader you use, online or standalone. As I understand it, you enter your feeds into Feedlinx. It will, in turn, convert your feeds into a special Feedlinx URL that you plug into your feed reader of choice. So if you use a standalone reader at home, and another standalone reader at work, each application will reflect the same read/unread status for your feeds. Same with using an online reader.

I haven't yet tried out this service, but if it works as promised, this can free you up to use different methods of monitoring RSS feeds without having to do manual synchronization (if it even applies to the particular reader you're using), as well as keeping feed status synced between different devices like your tablet and your PDA/Smartphone.

Pretty cool! I will try this out sometime and report back on how well it works. If anyone tries this out before I follow up, please let us know how it works out.

Sorry for the lack of blogging this weekend, Kids. My parents were in town, and there were a couple get-togethers that pulled me away from the computer (oh, the horror!). Seriously, though it was a leisurely weekend, I was out of the house a lot, so not much time to rest and lounge about w/ my tablet. Of course the weekend has gone by too quickly…back to pesky work tomorrow.

A few things I hope to blog about soon:

- Silver's insights on ink blogging

- how awesome Lost (the TV show) is

- how all my favorite shows are on hiatus now & how I'm going to deal with it

- more musings on X-Men 3

- whatever interesting techie/tablet news I come across

- etc…

Please stay tuned! Feel free to comment on this entry if you have suggestions on what you'd like to see me blog about.

Quick link before I go to bed: an NBC affiliate review of X-Men 3

I agree with it.

Okay, Kids. I just got back from seeing X-Men: The Last Stand, and I have to say that it was awesome (I know I like to use that word)! I am semi-familiar with the comic books, thanks to a couple of my cousins and my own comic book purchases, but I didn't follow all of the storylines regularly, and eventually my interest faded (especially when I realized how much money I was sinking into buying the various X-Men series!). I started reading the Ultimate X-Men series soon after the first X-Men movie came out and rekindled my interest in the comics. So my opinion of the movie is probably not going to be the same of someone who has a deeper knowledge of the Phoenix Saga storyline (like my cousins ), but I think that those more familiar with X-Men will enjoy the movie despite the changes that have been made.

It's likely that I'm going to see the movie in the theatre again (an occurrence that is increasingly rare nowadays, thanks to all the drivel that the big movie production houses like to foist on us), so I'm going to try to familiarize myself more with the Phoenix Saga, and read some other viewer reviews of the movie to try to get more out of a second viewing. Actually, this is the first time in a long while that the hubby and I went to a movie that had sold out showings. I guess I didn't really realize the interest in this movie was so high. I'm very happy that this is the case, though, because I think the X-Men franchise is worth all of the attention it's getting.

The special effects were pretty good, of course, and the action sequences were well done. I get the impression that the director, CG specialists, and cast had fun using different mutant powers. As was shown in the trailers and commercials, some kind of vaccine has been developed that can permanently suppress the mutant X gene. Mutants end up on both sides of the issue, with Magneto and his "brotherhood" army vehemently opposed to it and willing to start a war over it, while other mutants are interested in getting the "cure" and becoming normal human beings, ending their lifelong persecution. While the issue wasn't too deeply explored, I think it got an okay treatment. It could probably have been developed more, but I think Brett Ratner probably wanted to err on the side of action scenes than philosophical debates, a la The Matrix (and before you all get into a huff, I know some people think The Matrix was sort of flippant about the philosophical issues it tossed about; it's not my intention to debate that particular issue).

My bottom-line for the review is that I think it's worth seeing in the theatre at least once or twice. I'm pretty selective now about which movies I chose to watch in the theatre, given how much tickets are now, and how disappointing some movies can be (Silent Hill, anyone? Major blech.), so the fact that I would consider watching X-Men: The Last Stand in the theatres again is saying something.

Oh, and one last thing. If you go and see it, make sure that you stay until the very end of the film reel. Let's just leave it at that. Please comment here and let me know what you think! It'd be great to get an X-Men discussion thread going here.