XP rss reader recommendation?

November 11, 2005 11:16 AM

I'm looking for a rss reader client on XP that works essentially the same as Shrook or Netnewswire on OS X. I'm willing to pay for it. I've downloaded quite a few clients but none that I've downloaded have my favorite features of Shrook...

ESSENTIAL FEATURES
1a. I can hit the space bar and only the space bar to read through all my articles. If all of an article is currently visible, hitting the space bar goes to the next unread article. If there is still some of the article that hasn't been seen, space bar scrolls down a page.
1b. There are some feeds I get which only provide a short preview, and I find that the short preview is pretty useless. With those feeds, I would prefer to automatically view the article link in an internal web browser, instead of reading the half sentence preview. This is how Shrook works. A lot of readers have this feature to go automatically to the link, but this usually breaks the space bar feature (1a above).
1c. An alternative to the Shrook way which is not as good is to have the space bar feature and the ability to open links in the background. Netnewswire can do this.
2. I can use a keyboard shortcut to go the next unread article.
3. A three column wide screen view like this.
I find that I can read a lot faster in such a view.
4. Articles can be flagged/marked with a keyboard shortcut.
5. works with rss and atom

BONUS FEATURES
1. Links can be toggled to open up in an external browser in the background or foreground, depending on whether you hit a key when you mouse click (Ctrl for instance).
2. Feeds can be manually ordered, rather than alphabetically.

posted by mrkohrea to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Does it have to be an application? I used to use RSSBandit http://www.rssbandit.org/ for the three pane view, but switched to Bloglines, as it's much easier just to open links in a new tab in Firefox.
posted by Boobus Tuber at 11:46 AM on November 11, 2005

There's an extensive list of free rss readers here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_news_aggregators#Windows_freeware
posted by Boobus Tuber at 11:47 AM on November 11, 2005

I don't know that you're going to find exactly what you're looking for, but check out FeedDemon. I'm a NetNewsWire fan, and find it pretty usable.
posted by Laen at 11:48 AM on November 11, 2005

In the Wikipedia link above, take a look also at the Hybrid aggregators list.
posted by Sharcho at 1:27 PM on November 11, 2005

Opera. It has all these features.
posted by bigmusic at 4:12 PM on November 11, 2005

Here's the three pane layout that you like so much.
posted by bigmusic at 4:26 PM on November 11, 2005

I'm pretty sure that FeedDemon will do everything you want, with the possible exception of "if the article is more than one page then pressing space does page down instead of jumping to the next unread item." It has the "Use spacebar for single key reading" feature but this does not seem to include pagedown for long articles.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:03 PM on November 11, 2005

Looks like Opera is the winner. I tried Opera before, but I never enabled an email account in Opera, so that three pane screenshot was a really useful hint. All the other suggested readers don't have my essential feature #1. Bloglines is interesting, but it has some quirks that I think I don't like.

I'm kind of surprised to see that it's hard to find an rss reader that allows you to just use the space bar to navigate. Only old people like me who remember trn would want something so strange I guess.
posted by mrkohrea at 6:45 PM on November 12, 2005

(Where) can you import an OPML file of RSS feeds into Opera?
posted by clgregor at 1:20 PM on November 13, 2005

Google Reader
posted by muckster at 8:23 PM on November 13, 2005