Geek Software of the Week: RSSOwl!
If you use Google Chrome, you will note that if you click on an RSS feed on a web site, you just get a list of the text of the site, it is not organized in a nice web screen, as it is in Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. This is a shame. They do it because they have their own RSS News Reader, that came out BEFORE they came out with Google Chrome. Sigh. I use an RSS plugin for Chrome called “Slick RSS,” but, if you want a “standalone” RSS Reader, try out RSSOwl!
RSSOwl – RSS News Reader and Organizer
“What makes RSSOwl unique?
RSSOwl can be used on all major platforms like Windows, Linux (32 Bit and 64 Bit) and Apple Mac OS X.
You can display news feeds side by side in multiple tabs. This gives you a similar user experience you might already be familiar with from your web browser. Of course you can configure RSSOwl to limit the number of opened tabs or to not use tabs at all if you are not a big fan of them.
Use the embedded Browser to open the full content of a news entry from the originating web site. You can open as many browser tabs as you like and open any web site from the address field.
Enable the grouping mode to group a list of news entries from a feed by a specific attribute. E.g. you can group news by date, author, category, feed and much more. This makes it very easy to get an overview of news that belong together.
Switch to the newspaper view to get the full content of a feed displayed at once inside the embedded browser. You can still perform common actions like marking a news as read or sticky from the browser by using one of the actions that is provided for each entry below its headline.
Select from one of the keyword feeds to receive news from a specific topic of your interest. The available keyword feeds include popular providers like Google, Technorati, Delicious and Flickr.
With the notion of Saved Searches, a search can be used like a feed you are subscribed to: The news entries of this special feed are made up of the search results. The number of unread entries in saved searches is shown and will update as soon as new entries are downloaded.
You can create any number of News Bins to store news you think are worth keeping. News can either be copied or moved from any feed. With the help of News Filters, you can create rules to automatically move or copy news to News Bins.
Use Labels to associate keywords with news entries. You can assign any number of labels and create new ones. Each Label has its own color to make it easy to distinguish labeled news from others.
RSSOwl knows about a number of communities like Delicious and Technorati to share your feeds and news entries with. Simply open the menu on one of your subscriptions or news entries to bring up a list of communities for sharing. This makes it easy to let your friends know about interesting articles and feeds.
Never miss a news anymore with RSSOwl’s powerful search engine. There is lots of available search conditions to create a fine grained search. Results will show up directly in the dialog and the matching terms are highlighted in yellow. You can even save a search to use it like a feed where the news entries are made up of the search results.
News Filters are likely the most powerful feature in RSSOwl. They allow to automate common actions like moving or copying a news into a news bin. You can create as many filters as you need. Each filter is made up of search conditions to match specific news and a list of actions to perform on them. Once created, the filter will work on downloaded news that match the search conditions. A filter can be executed on existing news as well. Use this feature if you want to update lots of news at once.
You can easily add more feeds to RSSOwl by using the Import Wizard. Choose to import feeds from a file or web site, your Google Reader account, or let RSSOwl search for feeds that match any topic you are interested in. You can limit the search for feeds to your language to get the best results for you.
Use the Export Wizard to export your list of subscriptions including saved searches and news bins to a file. In addition to your subscriptions, you can export labels, news filters and settings to easily setup RSSOwl on a different computer.
With the help of the Clean-Up Wizard you can easily get rid of old news entries or feeds that have not updated in a while. Housekeeping made easy!
The Notifier is a small popup that displays the headlines of incoming news even when RSSOwl is minimized. You can mark news entries as sticky from the Notifier to remember reading the full content of the entry at a later time.
Configure the Notifier to show an excerpt of content for news entries. Use News Filters to show specific news inside the notifier. You can assign colors to distinguish specific news entries from others.
You can easily customize the toolbar in RSSOwl to make actions you commonly use easy to access with a single click.
The Downloads & Activity dialog shows what RSSOwl is busy doing. Downloads (e.g. for Podcasts) are showing up as well as the progress of updating your feeds.
Using feeds that are protected by username and password? No problem, RSSOwl supports BASIC, DIGEST and NTLM authentication schemes.
Since RSSOwl is storing usernames and passwords for protected feeds, you should consider some extra protection by setting up a master password.
You can define lots of properties in a very fine grained manner on folders and feeds.
There is tons of things to configure in RSSOwl to make it suit your needs. Take your time to see through the preferences pages. The overview page gives you some advise and a little search field on top allows to search across all preferences.
Press F1 to bring up the RSSOwl Tutorial that is worth reading to getting started with RSSOwl.
RSSOwl comes with an integrated automatic update that helps you keep your version up to date. From the dialog you can see the new features of the new version and start the installation.
You can easily install additional features into RSSOwl by using the integrated Add-on wizard. For example, the Newsgroup Reader makes it possible to read newsgroups in RSSOwl like feeds. You should give it a try!”