One project that I never really worked on was to write a RSS reader on Eclipse. I think I never got working on it because the task always seemed so big; there is a big hill to climb before I could’ve gotten anything working, and I didn’t have patience for that. So I’ve been using Feedreader for my feeds instead and it has worked admirably.

The one problem I have with Feedreader is that it is tied to my desktop. That has always been a characteristic of an app that is not web-enabled, and it’s usually fine, but I expect that I am going to be moving away from using my desktop in the near future. In preparation, I’ve been getting acclimated to being desktop-independent, and so I needed a replacement for Feedreader.

I took a look at the usual suspects, Bloglines and Google Reader. Bloglines hasn’t changed in 5 years! Google Reader seemed to have improved a bit, but it still wasn’t what I wanted. Specifically, I wanted a three-pane interface, and there was no way to quickly mark an item as read without using some special keyboard shortcut key. But it wasn’t all bad so I made the switch.

And actually, I found a way that GReader improved my experience. I use to visit Joystiq to catch up on Xbox360 news, but I hated the site. It is very obviously driven by publisher’s marketing budget; a title would get constant coverage weeks before its release, and then after release, they would never talk about it again. But unfortunately, it was still the best place to get the news. With GReader, I don’t feel compelled to read their posts, I just scan the headlines, read the ones that seem interesting and then mark-all-as-read. I guess that’s how you’re supposed to use RSS anyways.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: google, rss, xbox