I previously mentioned moving from Newzcrawler to Sharpreader as a desktop aggregator. Again I am getting a bit annoyed at the lack of development pace of Sharpreader and minimal improvements that has been made between most recent releases.
Lockergnome mentioned a new release of Saucereader and I checked it out.
It is very nice looking indeed with a modern interface, supports importing OPML files and has most of the bells and whistles you would want. I really like it and would switch to it permenantly once the following has been addressed:
- More keybindings – there is no simple way to move to the next unread item, the interface is a nightmare for people who do not like using their mice such as myself. My wrists are buggered, using a mouse hurts – using this software hurts a lot. Keybindings for opening in a new window etc would also be useful.
- Visual indication of new items arriving – something like a baloon popup but it has to be configurable, sharpreader has a rediculous baloon that takes loads of CPU.
- Abiltiy not to use IE as the browser, IE does not have proper ad blocking and so forth, I really do not wish to use it.
- Configurable actions on items – at the moment clicking on a item shows the RSS feed values of it, double clicking opens it in IE inside the reader, this isn’t nice at all. I like double clicking to open on a external browser such as firefox where I can catch up on all my sites and open interesting things in different tabs then later on go and read each opened tab.
- More sorting options for the display – I would like to sort new items on top no matter what the date in them says. Maybe I just have not found the right toggle or click since their page sorting does seem rather powerfull, I will keep fiddling this.
Most of these concerns/wishes has been mentioned on their support forum and I could tolerate most of these problems except the first one. I will not use a overly-mouse intensive program. Once that is fixed I will use this as my aggregator, for now I will have to go back to the old Sharpreader.
