NewsFeed 2.7 review

NewsFeed is an RSS/RDF/Atom reader and aggregator for UNIX-like operating systems, such as FreeBSD, Linux, or MacOS X, as well as Win

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 87K Developer: Martin C. Doege

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NewsFeed is an RSS/RDF/Atom reader and aggregator for UNIX-like operating systems, such as FreeBSD, Linux, or MacOS X, as well as Windows. NewsFeed project is written in Python and uses Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser for downloading and parsing feeds.

NewsFeed aims to be easy to setup and use and is something of a clone of NetNewsWire Lite (though admittedly not as Aqua-pretty). It only depends on Tk, no other libraries are required.

NewsFeed provides keyboard shortcuts for all safe actions. One can cycle through new items with the Space key, mark all items in a feed as read with m, and open an item in the browser by pressing o (or Return). See the documentation for more information.

Update intervals and caching times can be set on a per-feed basis. Autodiscovery of feeds is supported. A helper script for dealing with rss://-URIs is provided. Searches are possible, with search results being shown in the feed list like a regular feed and they are also updated live. This is a good way to look group topics from different feeeds. Use "Unsubscribe" to delete a search, just as you would remove a normal feed.

Here are some key features of "NewsFeed":
No installation required.
Easy to sync state between different machines, independent of architecture.
Keyboard shortcuts for all safe functions.
Live searches in the vein of smart playlists in iTunes.
OPML import and export of subscriptions.
Simple HTML rendering (i.e. no annoying color schemes, text always of readable size, etc.).
Stable � no crashes or core dumps, ever.
Browser-like Back button.
Items can be marked as important.
Handles RSS 2.0 enclosures.
Remembers its window position and size. (Not such a biggie, but far too many programs still don't do it.)
Works tranparently with proxies, thanks to Python's urllib module.
Tk GUI is pretty fast.

Requirements:
Python 2.2 or above
Tk 8.0 or above
Tkinter

What's New in This Release:
Normal Web pages can also be watched for changes via diffs.
Also new in this version are helper scripts for exporting unread and flagged items as HTML.
An issue with the data_files path in the setup script was fixed.