analog feelings, digital world

Since the moment I discovered rss feeds I can hardly imagine living without it. But… there is one problem with rss for me. Readers. I have tested various readers and I could not find one that would suit all my needs:

• possibility to use the reader on many machines (I am thinking about some kind of synchronization)
• I am keen of desktop programs – so it would be nice to have a desktop application (that could stay in system tray while working) and to be notified when new things appears
• it would be great if there would be possibility to use web based client – in case when installing desktop software is not possible (for example: reading feeds using some pda’s…)

For a long time I have been thinking that the best solution is Google’s web based rss reader. It has almost everything I want. There is also a lightweight version made especially for older pda’s and phones (Google Reader Mini) and a bit more sophisticated wrapper on Google Reader for mobile devices that can handle not only static html (ReaderMini – currently still in beta).
Google Reader and all similar solutions have one big advantage – you do not have to think about synchronizing state of your feeds. You just log on – on any machine you are currently working on – and that’s it. You got everything you need. But not everyone is a keen of ’software inside a browser’. Web based rss reader does not alert you about updated feeds – but there are some plugins for Firefox (and for others web browser too, I think) that will pop information about latest changes in your feeds. The biggest problem with Google Reader for me is that when I want to use Google’s search engine – I am logged. I don’t like it. I feel like Google knows much more about me that I would like them to.

Thats why I have started to write my own small application based on Google Reader that would stay in system tray and alert me about new feeds and allow me to read the content not having to bother about synchronization issues. I have found Nial Kennedy’s article about Google Reader API, I have also find some gossips about Google’s will to release Google Reader API to public in near future. Unfortunatelly it seems that Google no longer wants to make Google Reader API available to wide range of programmers all over the world. Later – after digging up for a while – I have found a small utility by BrianDotty called Google Reader Notifier - that allows you to have information about new feeds presented in the well known ‘tray ballon’ way (yup, I did use Reflector The Great ;> to see how to log into Google Reader ;) Another thing I have found was complete (I think) API for Google Reader written in C#. It is a pitty that there are no links for the applications that are using this API (GReader Desktop, GReader Mobile – both mentioned on the main page of the ‘Google Reader .NET API’).
After few days going through the code it stroke me that it is totally pointless to create another feature-rich rss reader. The best thing would be just to embedd a WebBrowser control in an application that could reside in system tray and provide some information about the feeds (how many feeds are unread and so on). So I just cut out all those things that were ‘extra’ and build a simple application with .NET WebBrowser control. It worked great but… it seems to consume a lot of memory. After using it for a while I have realized that it allocated about 60-70MB of RAM! And even the special trick with minimize-restore did not help much. I was wondering if it was a problem with WebBrowser control or with Google Reader. Hard to say at the moment but I plan to investigate this issue further on. The simpliest solution (embedded WebBrowser control) has one big advantage: you may go to your Google Calendar / GMail / Google Notebook with only a few clicks (and yes, you do not have this feeling that Google knows everything about you – whenever you use their search engine ;)

A few days ago I have found information about free NewsGator desktop application for reading rss feeds that has ability to synchronize information about your feed’s state between various machines. I tried it… and I think it is great. The desktop application is well known FeedDeamon that is now given by NewsGator for free. It almost perfect. You are able to use desktop or web based version of the reader – so all the time you know what have you read and what is still marked as to-read or important. There is one thing As for me FeedDemon lacks easy retrieval of older content for selected feed. Using Google Reader I got used to being able to see what were the previous posts / entries in selected feed. You just scroll down – and thats it – Google Reader automatically gets them for you (if there are any). I must say that FeedDemon is really easy to use and does not need a lot of memory – after having it run for more than 20 hours it did not consume more than 20MB.

I you are just like me – and synchronization and availability of desktop reader are the most important for you – you should give NewsGator a try – but I will give my application another chance and see what is the real problem with such a hughe memory consumption.