Notices

Are there any other RSS readers that update periodically, without having to keep them open?

FeedingIt does it with the widget, the inbuilt rss reader does it. But I'm looking for an alternative.

I like my feeds updated when I open the reader and don't want to wait 30secs for all the feeds to update before I can start reading.

FeedCircuit is another rss reader, but not sure how it does its updates.
The other alternative is to use Google Reader, with Grr or Gread (I don't think they have any offline mode though, but haven't tried myself).

In any case, I'd be interested in hearing your experience with FeedingIt and if there is anything in particular that makes you look for alternatives (which I think is a very good thing, but options are unfortunately rather limited at the moment).

Feedingit is great and I rely on it, but it would be nice if it had the integrated ability to be set to update at a certain specific time, such as 4 a.m. daily. I guess I can automatically update every 24 hours, but that just means 24 hours after my last update, right?

There is an inherent problem with the RSS process, which I don't think Feedingit can really correct for. If you are reading the NY Times Editorial section, for example, you might run into a headline "It's Gone on Too Long." There is no way you are going to know what that is about without opening the article. Yes, you can see a partial description, but it's a hassle and even that might not be enough.

But in most articles, with headlines such as "Togo Invades North Korea" it works fine.

Once upon a time, programs were available that actually summarized articles by some kind of AI process. I always thought it was a promising technology...

The best way to do so is to use one of the scheduling programs (can't remember the exact name right this moment), and have it run the command "FeedingIt update" at whichever time and date you want. It is not integrated as it is quite a complicated feature, and there are already dedicated programs that does it much better.

As for un-informative titles, that's what the media is like now. It's all about getting traffic to their site, and that is done mostly with titles that grab the attention and make you click through even if they are quite inaccurate. Not sure there is all that much we can do about that, other than report it directly to the source (or find better sources).

Yes, I know there are dedicated programs that do this, thanks. There isn't just one; there are at least three, probably more. I think one is called Chron. But the idea of just setting the time in Feedingit was appealing enough that I thought I'd mention it. These other scheduling programs aren't particularly fun to use.

Lately, I have set threads not to display if they have already been read. This means that when I open up Feedingit, I am often looking at a blank screen, mainly. I was thinking that in such a situation, it would be nice if a message would appear: "No feeds are available. Update?" Or something like that. Of course, what I always do is click on the title bar and then select update all feeds.

I don't think integrating it in FeedingIt would make it any more fun to use

Very good point, if all feeds are read, it probably gives a black screen, that should/will be improved.
In the new interface (see the FeedingIt thread/website for a video preview), you've got the update button available in a single click in the toolbar, rather than in a menu.

Ah Slocan, don't sweat it!
I really appreciate your hard work on F-it, it has become a fantastic program and isn't going anywhere soon on my n900. I literally use it daily - for hours.

Why I am asking for alternatives? Dunno... curiosity. Saw a new version for one of the other rss readers in appman.

There's only one thing with F-it that kinda bugs me - it's the widget. It's opaque and obtrusive. It's working perfectly fine, but it doesn't use the standard "widget background" bitmap and thus isn't configurable with theme customizer. (I use the "small" widget size.)

Yes, I know - you already answered a request about it. I don't want to annoy you; I'm very happy with FeedingIt, and I don't want to sound like a nitpicker. Don't feel obliged to anything.

So what would make me happy? Perhaps a commandline option for updating FeedingIt, that could be used by a cronjob tool like Alarmed. Perhaps an "invisible" widget option. Perhaps a small widget with a transparent background.

I do some coding myself, and I know that some of those "innocent" requests can be a "p.i.t.a"... some users have strange ideas about looks and design of a program :-(

You mean like running "FeedingIt update" as he suggested in post #4 in this thread?

*self-facepalm*

I fail so hard. sorry. and thanks...

Oh, I don't sweat it, but I like to hear the negative criticisms too (not so much that I like hearing it, but that I know it's the way to improve things). Oftentimes, my response will be quite simple, for example that I agree, the widget isn't very nice looking, but that I can't do any better for now. But other times, it's just providing a bit of information, like an obscure command line that nobody knows about! Maybe I need a marketing team!

And I hope I didn't deviate the thread out of the search for alternatives. I couldn't be happier to find a better reader myself, so I do hope something comes along.

Not sure I quite like that abbreviation :-D.