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Sauce Reader, a first look

b.gr plays with a new feed reader.

This entry was first published on September 21, 2004, 03:38 AM, CET and categorized as Web.

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While FeedDemons remains the best feed reader for the Windows platform, it has one major drawback for me: no Outlook like folder structure to manage the feed subscriptions. So I am using RSSBandit for my daily aggregation needs. The drawbacks with RSSBandit are the strict handling of XML errors and the lack of viewing all new items on a single page, but the tree weights the later up. Enter Sauce Reader v1.7 (BETA) (found via Great blog tool...), with which I played today and this entry does cover (most) of my first impression about it.

The Good

First, the goodies (though most are standard nowadays for a feed reader).

• Outlook 2003 style UI and pane layout (including the folders to manage the feeds)
• Sauce Reader seems to take the FeedDemon road and handle XML errors inside the feeds less strict
• Like FeedDemon, Sauce Reader displays all unread (or all items, depending on the settings) on a single page
• Search Folders, which are added to the currently selected folder but are still global. A root level Search Folders folder would be a better place :)
• Comment reading support, to which i need to get used and change the style to highlight newly added comments

The Issues

Ok, Sauce Reader is still BETA so these minor issue will be fixed in the final - hopefully :)

• The section tree view plus/minus buttons have an unusual small target: you have to click the image to expand/collapse the tree and cannot just aim to the vague location of the button
• The Office 2003 theme ignores the colours of the current XP theme (it is looked into the default blue theme)
• Memory/CPU usage on feed updates seem kind of high
• I have yet to find a way to view the errors that happened during a feed update...
• Search Folders are limited to keywords only, so no Unread Items ones :(
• The desktop alerts take focus sometimes

The b.gr theme

As with each feed reader the first (well, second thing after the import of the feeds) is to get my Style onto it: FeedDemons style is here and, because I am lazy and they look pretty much the same, I added the one for RSSBandit to that page, too. And, until I know how to organize the various styles, the style for Sauce Reader can also be found there :)