I previously mentioned moving from Newzcrawler to Sharpreader as a desktop aggregator. Again I am getting a bit annoyed at the lack of development pace of Sharpreader and minimal improvements that has been made between most recent releases.
Lockergnome mentioned a new release of Saucereader and I checked it out.
It is very nice looking indeed with a modern interface, supports importing OPML files and has most of the bells and whistles you would want. I really like it and would switch to it permenantly once the following has been addressed:
- More keybindings – there is no simple way to move to the next unread item, the interface is a nightmare for people who do not like using their mice such as myself. My wrists are buggered, using a mouse hurts – using this software hurts a lot. Keybindings for opening in a new window etc would also be useful.
- Visual indication of new items arriving – something like a baloon popup but it has to be configurable, sharpreader has a rediculous baloon that takes loads of CPU.
- Abiltiy not to use IE as the browser, IE does not have proper ad blocking and so forth, I really do not wish to use it.
- Configurable actions on items – at the moment clicking on a item shows the RSS feed values of it, double clicking opens it in IE inside the reader, this isn’t nice at all. I like double clicking to open on a external browser such as firefox where I can catch up on all my sites and open interesting things in different tabs then later on go and read each opened tab.
- More sorting options for the display – I would like to sort new items on top no matter what the date in them says. Maybe I just have not found the right toggle or click since their page sorting does seem rather powerfull, I will keep fiddling this.
Most of these concerns/wishes has been mentioned on their support forum and I could tolerate most of these problems except the first one. I will not use a overly-mouse intensive program. Once that is fixed I will use this as my aggregator, for now I will have to go back to the old Sharpreader.
Thanks for taking the time to try out Sauce Reader. Your comments here are helpful for working out our development priorities.
Your description of the keyboard shortcuts problem was particularly interesting. To be honest, the importance of keyboard shortcuts to users was a surprise to us – I guess we are mouse happy. The beauty of Beta feedback…
“Open in new browser window” will use your default browser when right clicking (more mouse ) on a feed or item. Unfortunately, open in new window from the built in Browser control still uses IE.
You can sort by read / unread by clicking the column at the very left (above the read / unread images). This may help your experience a little.
We’re working crazy hours to make Sauce Reader as great as possible, so please send us any other feedback or comments you have that will help it improve…
cheers, Nathan
Hey, it’s really great to see developers taking such a keen interest in what users have to say!
The sorting thing works a charm I have to say I really like how functional it is, thanks for pointing out the obvious!
It may be an idea to turn off Javascript parsing in the browser window – when displaying the contents of your feed, not when opening the site – I am seeing nasty things happen because of weird javascript in one feed, infact I cannot view it at all at the moment – IE windows popping up saying there is a error on the page etc. Javscript shouldnt be in a RSS feed to begin with, but alas.
RIP I tried Sauce Reader, but found it a bit much on the memory. Currently using FeedDemon, and it uses around 5mb ram loaded, Sauce Reader uses around 78mb ram when loaded. Quite a difference. I’ll keep an eye on SauceReader though.
BTW, a number of your concerns should be addressed in v1.4 due out soon. Sauce Reader will auto-update when it is available.
Javascript removal from feeds would be nice, I’ve added that to our feature request list.
Memory use is indeed too large, we’ve improved this substantially for 1.4 particularly when updating.
cheers, Nathan