As I mentioned earlier, I've decided to switch to RSS Bandit because my old aggregator self-destructed on an upgrade. I wasted an entire day on it and would rather waste my time other ways.
- Reading may be a little faster, particularly with me getting comfortable with scrolling through the newspaper view, instead of individual items. I still haven't decided which I like better.
- "Next unread item" means the oldest unread item, rather than the youngest. This seems to run counter to most of the aggregators, which present the newest unread item. Interestingly, the "newspaper" view shows items in reverse chronological order.
- Space bar goes to "next unread," rather than doing a "scroll" in the current reading pane window when viewing in newspaper mode. If the reading pane has focus, it will scroll there. When reading a single post, it does scroll as expected.
- RSS Bandit is much more sensitive to errors in the feeds - more accurately, it tells me that there are errors in some feeds. They provide a "feed error" folder that lists problems as they arise. But I see that the feeds it has trouble with work fine elsewhere. Not good.
- I can't get the full text on excerpt-only feeds. This is probably the biggest loss of moving from the old reader.
- I like the newspaper view, when I select a folder (they call them "categories"). Articles are listed in descending order, but are grouped by feed. I don't quite understand how the feeds are sorted (it's not by the feed with the most recent article is at the top.) This is a handy mode for reading unread stuff once or twice a day.
- RSS Bandit is a stand-alone application, but it uses the Internet Explorer engine to render HTML and XSLT. By default, it opens links in tabs within the app. You can also have it open links in the default browser. I like the tabs in the application. Now I need to find out if there are keyboard shortcuts for navigating the tabs.
- The BlogJet This plug-in works in the reading windows. But the BlogJet This plug-in for IE does not work in the tabs that open within RSS Bandit.
- RSS Bandit, as other stand-alone aggregators, lets me customize a whole category or individual feeds for the update frequency and a few other aspects. However,
- Email this only emails the URL of the post. I'd rather it give the entire text (HTML) of the item (along with the URL).
That's enough for now. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts later. Maybe I'll switch again.