Wednesday, June 23, 2004

My search for a Linux RSS reader is finally over. I have settled upon RSSOwl. My quest was not an easy one at all. A Google search revealed that the most popular ones are Straw and AmphetaDesk, but neither of these could be installed on the first attempt. Had I been in a more forgiving mood, I might have rolled up my sleeves and gone about resolving the issues (Straw complained that intltool-merge was missing; AmphetaDesk has such a painful installation process involving Perl/CPAN), but I was not, so I decided to give RSSOwl a whirl.

Installation of RSSOwl proved to be a snap, but I had trouble getting it to work. After some patient hand holding by Ben Pasero (the lead developer of RSSOwl), I am all set.

P.S. Being a Smalltalk fan, BottomFeeder was my first choice, but I was not very happy with the UI (right-click on an item and you are shown a context menu with something like 20 choices). The fonts were not very impressive either. One of these days I am going to devote a post to the ways in which BottomFeeder can be improved.