Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

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RSS Aggregator Annoyances

Let me preface this post with the statement that both RSS Bandit and SharpReader are good programs developed after work hours by some very talented individuals. The authors share with us their hard work and I am not diminishing their efforts in any way. But there are a few things that bother me with each program, and I offer them here in case contributing developers are interested in the feedback.

Why I still don’t use RSS Bandit

In Outlook, when I move the mouse over one of the three panes (in Outlook XP), that pane gets focus. So to scroll up and down I can move the mouse over the pane and then use the scroll wheel. I can’t do this in RSS Bandit. I have to click on the pane first. If you are going for the Outlook metaphor, it has to be all there (even Outlook Web Access does this).
There is no keyboard shortcut for opening the list of comments to a feed. I can use the up and down arrows to go through the posts in a feed, but I have to use the mouse to click on the little plus sign to expand the comments. I should be able to use left and right arrows just like any other treeview controller. UPDATE: you can use the + and - keys to navigate the treeview.
The keyboard shortcuts for moving among the treeview, listview, and detail panes (Tab and Shift Tab) do not work in any intuitive way. I have pressed Tab 20 times and can’t get the listview to get focus.

Without the above features, I will not move away from SharpReader. Switching costs are a bitch. :)

Why I am unhappy with SharpReader

In Outlook, when I move the mouse over one of the three panes (in Outlook XP), that pane gets focus. So to scroll up and down I can move the mouse over the pane and then use the scrollwheel. I can’t do this in SharpReader. I have to click on the pane first. If you are going for the Outlook metaphor, it has to be all there (even Outlook Web Access does this).
Search functionality is limited compared to other aggregators.
No way to update a feed that has moved location. I have to delete the old subscription and subscribe to a new feed. The problem is I change the default blog names, so I have to make the change again.

Without the above features, I will continue to use SharpReader until I find something better. Better is a qualitative term that weighs how much another program costs, how well it works compared to my cognitive map and computing habits, etc.

I still have others to check out, but I don’t know if I have time to go through this whole list. One thing I would especially like is the ability to notify me if someone leaves a comment to a post I have commented on. Anyone know of a reader that does this?

Published Feb 08 2004, 08:34 PM by darrell

Comments

Dare Obasanjo said:

The Outlook focus feature you mention doesn't seem that interesting to me and sounds like it'd might be a pain to implement. Torsten does the UI stuff so I assume he'll eventually find this post and decide whether he wants to implement such a feature or not.

As for keyboard shortcuts, we keep getting conflicting requests from folks but one or two of the ones you mention sound like they have merit and I'll add them to the list when Torsten and I start working on plans for a future release.

By the way, if you don't switch that's fine with me. RSS Bandit meets my needs and based on the various comments on my blog and in various other blogs it meets the needs of a bunch of other people as well. I know you can't please everyone so aggregator "world domination" isn't my goal. I just wanted a simple useful aggregator that had features I actually wanted and could be used as a learning experience for .NET developers. It's satisfied that goal for me. Anything else is icing on the cake.

# February 8, 2004 4:38 PM

TorstenR said:

Yes Dare, I see it :-)

Right, there is still a problem with the Tab key support, but it is on the way. Another point: "There is no keyboard shortcut for opening the list of comments to a feed" is definitivly wrong. You can use the "+/-" keys on the numeric keypad like you can do the same at the treeview of subscribed feeds like you can do the same as in every windows explorer to open/close a folder. Try it.

# February 8, 2004 6:28 PM

Paul Bartlett said:

I've been wanting the comment feature you mention as well. What I tend to do as a workaround is create a Favourites folder for just this purpose, and "poll" the items in it. Not particularly high-tech, I realise, but it works...

# February 8, 2004 9:29 PM

RebelGeekz said:

I would add:

- Importing Opmls from URLs
- Auto-updating Opmls

I hate having to open the opml in the browser, save the file in my drive and import it again everytime a new blogger gets added to a roll.

Congratulations to both, great products!

# February 9, 2004 12:43 AM

James Avery said:

Switch to FeedDemon, it does your mouse location scrolling thingy. It also lets you modify a feed, has pretty good search (better in the new beta), and more.

Yeah it costs $$$, but it is well worth it.

-James

# February 9, 2004 1:21 AM

Darrell said:

Dare -

This was meant to be constructive criticism. I am quite impressed with RSS Bandit, but I started using SharpReader first so I've gotten used to its quirks. :) I understand there are always conflicting requests, and part of your job is to balance them all.

The Outlook focus feature is not hard to do. Just create an OnMouseOver event for the control (ie, the TreeView) and in the event handler give the control focus.

Regardless of whether I use it or not, keep up the good work, because many people do use it.

Thanks,
Darrell

# February 9, 2004 2:13 AM

Darrell said:

Torsten -

I did not know about the +/- keys for the treeview. I will have to try it out! But I'm still used to the left and right arrow keys which Outlook also uses.

Is it ok to do both? Outlook does, and that is the metaphor that RSS Bandit (and indeed, most aggregators) attempt to duplicate. Just a thought.

Thanks for the tip!

# February 9, 2004 2:16 AM

Darrell said:

James - I will check FeedDemon out. Could be my first software purchase of 2004.

# February 9, 2004 2:44 AM

Luke Hutteman said:

Looks like RSS Bandit just picked the other set of "default" shortcuts to expand/collapse folders.

I was unaware that +/- also works in treeviews so just implemented the arrow-keys in SharpReader, while I guess Torsten was used to +/- and implemented those.

Personally I prefer the arrow-keys as that's where I'm at on the keyboard anyway when navigating through a list. I might just implement +/- as well though as there are bound to be users that are used to those shortcuts instead.

Regarding the mouse-wheel focus-thingy: actually changing the focused component on mouse-over seems counter-intuitive to me and is not what outlook does either. IMHO, the preferred behavior (which is implemented in Outlook) would be to have the scroll-wheel operate on whatever component the mouse is hovering over at the time, instead of on the focused component. Unfortunately this is not the default behavior of .NET apps...

# February 9, 2004 4:16 AM

Darrell said:

Luke -

You're right on the focus thing. Outlook does scroll whatever control the mouse is hovering over. I implemented that in one of my apps as giving the control focus, which worked for my small app but probably not for a bigger app.

Keep up the good work on SharpReader!

Thanks for commenting,
Darrell

# February 9, 2004 5:15 AM