Best RSS Reader for Netbooks

As we all know, Netbooks lack the screen real estate that larger PC’s have. Sure you can plugin an external monitor to help out, but when you are mobile you don’t have that luxury.

I’ve sampled a lot of RSS Readers in my time, most fit for the basics of RSS subscription and aggregation but only a few really stand out of the crowd. Add in the needs of the mobile blogger / tech writer and you have an even harder task on hand, if you are a blogger constantly on the go then having a robust RSS Reader is essential.

So lets delve into the world of RSS Readers for Netbooks.

Google Reader

This is an excellent RSS reader for on the go for most laptop and cross-platform but is good for netbooks? Lets take a look.

On the plus side Google Reader does indeed fit the bill for portability, not requiring installation other than a current version browser and the much needed internet connection.

You can also use this offline with an installation of Google Gears and of course if you use Google Chrome then you can install the Google Reader Notifier Extension to know when new items are available.

Reading articles on the small screen with Google Reader is pretty good, especially if your browser has an excellent full screen mode.

To be accurate, Google Reader is a web app pretending to be a traditional desktop reader, it contains features that usually only desktop readers would have.

On the netbook it is as nimble as your current internet connection is, so waiting for content to load isn’t a problem, there are some UI elements which could be smaller such as the subscriptions sidebar width, it would also be nice to be able to minimize or remove the items listed in the sidebar that you don’t always need.

Pros: Google reader is fast, clean and built for usability.

Cons: A few UI flaws that need to be updated.

RSS Owl

RSS Owl has been around for a long time, longer even than Google’s offerings in fact.

First released in 2004, it has a lifetime of development to make it a strong RSS reader. Where it differs from Google Reader is this is a desktop solution, software that has been written exclusively in Java.

Although being a desktop application it is available for Windows, Mac OS X and a variety of Linux flavors.

RSS Owl is a great desktop reader, its interface is clean and uncluttered, plenty of options for the avid RSS reader and being written in Java its nice and snappy when downloading new feed content.

However on a netbook the only useful feed viewer setting is the newspaper view. Best of all though is that it comes in a portable flavor, meaning you can throw it on a USB drive and off you go.

Syncing is amazing with RSS Owl, the developers really have made it easy to sync from a wide range of sources, Google Reader, OPML and a plethora of others.

The wide and vertical views are not good on the small screen as you cannot read the post titles.

The one great saving viewing feature however is the tabbed views your open feeds is a great way to switch between each feed.

Pros: Quick, clean and useful and syncs to a wide range of sources including Google Reader. Portable version available.

Cons: Limited options for small screen space.

FeedDemon

FeedDemon is an enormously popular RSS reader, its also a reader that has been with us for a long time.

Originally being developed for Newsgator as paid software with online subscription features from Newsgator.com, fast forward a few years and it became freeware with feed syncing  to Google Reader.

FeedDemon looks great on the small screen, lots of space for your feeds to occupy, minimizing subscription pane, tiny header pane makes this all a joy to use.

FeedDemon has an amazing array of features that will keep even the most addicted RSS junkie happy.

On the downside, feed syncing is fairly slow, even with just a few feeds on a fast connection, so a large number of feeds would slow the process down considerably.

Another downside is that without hacks you can’t use the official build of FeedDemon as a portable app (mind you I’m sure the more industrious of you would find a portable version somewhere).

Finally and understandably it is ad supported. Going from paid software to freeware is a hard task, the ads are unobtrusive but still niggle at the senses while reading your favorite feed.

Pros: Probably the best reading experience from a downloadable client

Cons: Slow feed syncing, no portable version, it is ad supported.

FeedReader

FeedReader may appear to be one of the weaker of the RSS readers available for desktop use.

Its basic, really basic, but that might not be too bad.

FeedReader is really a bare bones reader, it has simple and functional features without providing a full on RSS reading experience like something like FeedDemon provides. No options to gather data from external online readers like Google Reader, it does have an import feature for OPML files so you can at least export your feeds from another source or sync from FTP / OPML hosted remotely.

The biggest drawback is that you need to add each feed manually to the reader, FeedReader does have auto-discovery which works for the most part but fails sometimes with websites that offer multiple feeds.

It comes in both installable and portable flavors to keep both worlds happy.

Pros: Terribly lightweight, great reading pane size.

Cons: Manual feed input, no syncing to online readers.

The Verdict

Really its up to you in the end, these 4 options are by no means the only on offer, feed tickers and other methods to get your RSS fix are available in droves.

If you have another reader you love to use on your netbook or have other alternatives for RSS reading, hit the comments to let me know!

Focus Writer – Distraction Free Writing Bliss

There are plenty of distraction free writing applications, and I’ve used a swath of them, none capturing exactly what I wanted.

I realized pretty quickly that what I wanted was a distraction free writing environment that had a host of smart features hidden away but totally at fingertip.

Now as some of you may know I use both Mac and Windows platforms, and of course its difficult at best to find a developer that writes cross-platform software at the best of times.

I tried WriteRoom for Mac, which although does what it says on the box, but of course I have a Windows laptop so it wasn’t suitable for on the go writing.

Next was DarkRoom, a direct clone of WriteRoom. While this is written for Windows, its heavily dependent on .Net, and although this is fine for my laptop its not good for portability if I wanted to use it off a USB Key (not all machines have .Net unfortunately).

PyRoom was a good compromise but lacked features, so I was still looking for a perfect solution. Q10 was also a winner, but as it had lacked active development for a while and wasn’t cross platform.

Then through a complete stroke of luck I was checking out some freeware products and stumbled upon Focus Writer from Gottcode.org.

• Is it cross-platform? Yep
• Does it have better features than the competition? Yep
• Dependant on a required framework? Nope

Focus Writer is the masterpiece of distraction free writing, lightweight, cross-platform, feature rich glorious writing application that packs a punch.

Its flexibly customizable, meaning you can make it look and feel exactly how you want, green/orange on black terminal style? want an image in the background? specific font or text widths?

Just whip up a theme and you can have the look and feel you want.

But most distraction free writers can do this, where Focus Writer shines is in the details, extremely well integrated spell checking, daily goals and totals that are easy to set up and track, live stats-as-you-type about your current document and a tabbed document interface.

Opening documents side-by-side in a tabbed environment is paramount to successful writing. You can have your main document you are writing open along with a notes document, this is glorious to keep track of where your writing is going.

Some other writers of this type provide you with a keyboard full of shortcuts to control the application (I’m looking squarely at you Q10) but Focus Writer tucks them nicely into the top and bottom of the screen, just a mouse over away, this means less chance you’ll hit some weird key combination by accident and ruin the document you are on currently.

Long story short (no pun intended… no really… REALLY) Focus Writer is a godsend, its an amazingly flexible writing application that I can’t praise enough.

Give it a try now:

Download Focus Writer Here

Ghosts of Open Source

Open Source has been a hot topic across software industries for a long time.

As an evolution from the freeware revolution to promote source code for released applications, Open Source has been adopted by not only bleeding edge technologists and coding enthusiasts but also by a wider population of people looking for low/no cost software solutions with a defined support backbone.

This is where freeware differs greatly from Open Source, traditionally freeware is developed by a small number of coders, often only a single coder patching and incrementing version.

Open Source however is community based by nature, where several hundred, or even thousand coders can come together to both support and improve upon a product through bug fixing and code development.

This type of development has become more popular with the advent of online open source project code hosting such as GitHub.

While this is perfectly fine on home and small business platforms, where does Open Source fit in mission critical production systems for large corporations?

There are plenty of arguments as to why businesses should support Open Source applications, but also plenty against.

On the plus side Open Source can provide low to no cost alternatives to expensive software, the most stand out would be when choosing office suites.

• Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Plus – approx. $700.00+
• Open Office 3.2 – $0.00

And while this looks appealing on the surface, what do you lose in the trade off?

Well lets examine this, while you are provided with a suite of alternatives for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access you also lose features that each individual application provides.

This can be devastating in the business world when time and productivity is lost attempting to open documents with features that the Open Source application does not provide.

A good example of this is within Excel 2007, a standard feature is to use conditional formatting to provide colouring to a series of data, Open Office cannot replicate this feature, and although it can open Excel 2007 documents it fails to be truly compatible.

But is this really a problem?

Well yes and no. If your business is centered around the creation of documents for internal use between your staff members, then something like Open Office is a perfect alternative, you’ll only ever use features available in the application.

But if your business requires you to share documents to and from third parties then it bucking the trend to save money can be detrimental.

So where can Open Source fit into your organization? In the cracks…

Everyone knows the frustration of having to complete a specific task that eludes even some of the most expensive software titles. This is where Open Source software excels.

As with freeware, Open Source applications are usually born from frustration of limited or badly coded paid software, that one feature that nothing really does well or that one task that everything can do, but not do well.

This is where businesses would be best to take advantage of Open Source.

Need a CD/DVD Burning solution for your organisation? Sick of purchasing expensive CD/DVD authoring software to find its full of bloat? Try InfraRecorder for a bloat free burning application thats every bit as good as its paid alternatives.

Need a good unicode compliant programmers notepad? Dedicated IDE’s too expensive? Give Notepad++ a go for well developed and mature notepad replacement that provides a strong programming environment with code highlighting for over 30 different coding languages!

WHAT ABOUT SUPPORT?, I hear you say.

Well support is an interesting conundrum with Open Source products, its true that with a paid software solution you also generally are provided with a support channel with the manufacturer / software vendor, does this usually help resolve issues?

If its a configuration issue then yes but if its a coding bug or flaw then probably not, the manufacturer may choose to add your issue to its bug tracking or just disregard the request hoping it will go away in time.

As long as they are still making money, then the wheel still turns.

Open Source software is also usually well supported, the difference here is that its community supported. The people who have created the software,  actively develop or review code for the application and general users of the program form the basis of support in Open Source.

This does have one clear advantage, support is only a forum away (or several if its a widely used product), and it can be almost guaranteed that if you have encountered an issue then multiple others will have also and its already been escalated to the developers, this means that if its a big enough issue you can expect a version update soon.

Until then however you may need to mitigate the issue with another piece of Open Souce / freeware or resolve the issue in another way.

So whats left?…

Well the 900 pound gorilla in the room is the question, should businesses look to Open Source for all the answers?

That is an easy question to answer… No

Businesses need to weigh the pros and cons of implementing Open Source software in their organisation.

• Do I have a clearly defined need?
• Is the paid solution cost prohibitive?
• Does the paid solution only partially resolve the issue?

If the answer to more than one of these questions is yes then you have nothing to lose but a little time.

If the answer to more than one is no however, then you need to test each solutions and choose the most appropriate for your business.