GreatNews is another desktop rss reader that comes with all the features one would expect from a rss reader. It can import opml feeds which is a standard XML format that contains feed information. Basically any feed reader can export and import opml files. The first thing that observant users will notice is the low resource usage. A direct comparison between FeedDemon and GreatNews revealed that GreatNews was using between 10-20 Megabytes of computer memory less than FeedDemon did. (GreatNews uses about 3 Megabytes when minimized while FeedDemon uses more than 7 MB)

Resource usage is not everything on the other hand. Updating feeds in the rss reader seemed to be a bit faster than it was in FeedDemon as well. This might be caused by a subroutine of the desktop rss reader that automatically detects dead or feeds that have not been updated in a very long time giving the user the option to remove those feeds from the rss software. FeedDemon has a similar option as it displays feeds that are no longer working or have not been updated in a specific time as well. This is a manual process however.

One of the more interesting features of GreatNews is the so called News Watches. This makes it possible to make the desktop rss reader search for keywords automatically in previously defined rss feeds. It is for example possible to search for the name “Bill Gates” in all subscribed rss news feeds, or for the term Linux only in the Ghacks feed. This is an excellent way to find keyword related news articles faster than usual.

Other features are:

• Various styles can be selected, custom ones created. This includes styles that do not display images, flash or other multimedia contents.
• Offline reading.
• Saving news articles locally.
• Article labels to access articles faster.
• Full page reading
• Statistics
• Track Comments

Are there any disadvantages? The only thing that’s not looking bright is support for the desktop rss reader. While the software developer is still active on the website he does not seem to have plans to update the software further except for a few necessary bug fixes. This is not a problem right now as everything in the news reader is working as intended and without complications. GreatNews as of now is an excellent alternative to FeedDemon.

I usually fired up Google Reader and kept it open all the time to read new RSS feeds. The problem with that approach was that this meant that I was always logged into my Google account. The Google account was used for other Google services as well. Having read about Gmail and Google vulnerabilities before I decided that it would be best to move from Google Reader to another client to prevent that the account data would fall into the wrong hands. Yes, the likelihood was not very high but the chance existed.

Newzie was one of the first RSS readers that I evaluated and I immediately liked it. It was easy to import the opml file from Google Reader into Newzie so that all of the subscribed feeds would be available in the new RSS reader as well.

The default display mode of this RSS reader is to sort feeds by the time they were last updated with the most recently updated feeds at the top of the list. This view can be changed to a folder mode that simply lists all feeds alphabetically in their folders. The order of the feeds can be changed and the visibility of the complete menu can be toggled to increase screen size for the actual news items.

The RSS feeds are displayed in their own browser-like interface. A click on a title or link will load that link in a new tab in the Newzie interface. This is actually one of my complaints that I have with the RSS reader. I would have preferred that links would open in the default browser instead but I guess many users will think that reading them right in the RSS reader might be the more comfortable way. There is actually an option to load the link externally but it is hidden in a submenu.

The main interface provides access to three view modes:

Report View: Will only display new feed items filling out the complete interface
List View: Will divide the main interface into an upper panel that is displaying the RSS items and a lower panel that is displaying the contents of the active item.
List View 2: Like the first Live View only that the contents are divided vertically and that the RSS items are sorted by date

All posts can be marked read, deleted, flagged or copied / moved.

One interesting feature of Newzie is the ability to look at the news items of a particular feed by hovering the mouse over the feed. This makes it possible to quickly look at new items that have been posted without having to actually load the feed.

New items can be filtered right from the main interface using so called on-the-fly filtering. Commands like title=name would list all posts with name being part of their titles. Other filters make it possible to view only posts that have been updated before, at or after a certain period in time, posts that have been posted in a specific folder or posts that have a certain priority associated with them.

There is also a second interesting option which makes it possible to create so called virtual channels which apply word filters to RSS feeds. It would be possible to create a virtual channel that would contain all posts that would contain “portable software” in the body. It is currently only possible to apply those filters to the title, body or all of the news item. These filters can be combined by using AND or OR relations. It would be nice to see support for other information like author or tags added to the filter in the future.

Newzie offers another interesting related feature. It can monitor websites even if they do not offer an RSS feed. It can monitor any website for any kind of changes or specific changes. Specific changes can be words, text segments, links or images. Those monitored websites would then be added to the same menu containing the RSS feeds.

Other features Newzie is offering:

• Statistics
• Newsticker
• Monitoring IE favorites
• Feed priorities

A few more options to customize the RSS reader would be helpful. This would include the option to load links in the default web browser by default, an option to always display only the titles of the items in the overview and the ability to filter additional variables like author or tags.