Sunday 27 December 2009

RSSOwl 2.0.1 Review - Feature-Rich Feed Reader for Linux

Written in Java, RSSOwl is a powerful feed reader for Linux, with support for RSS, RDF and Atom feeds, with a lot of features and customisation options.

Licensed under the Eclipse Public License, RSSOwl includes features like:

- tabbed browsing
- three view modes: classic, vertical and newspaper
- possibility to share news to popular social networks like Twitter, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati or Delicious
- labels
- notifications
- news filters
- add-on support
- importing and exporting feeds and feed preferences
- system tray integration (via the Tools -> Preferences -> View menu)

And these features aren't all the features RSSOwl can offer.

RSSOwl 2.0.1 in Ubuntu

By default, RSSOwl opens with a typical interface to feed reader applications, with the feeds list to the left and the web browser tabs to the right (classic view), but this can be changed from the View -> Layout menu. The other two view modes are Vertical View (which will split the news widget to the left and the browser to the right) and Newspaper View (which will list both the news title and the feed content in the same widget).

Newspaper view mode

The 'import' function allows the user to import feeds from a file or website, but it also includes the possibility to import recommended feeds, and, more useful, feeds which match user-specified tags from pre-defined news websites, like Google or Yahoo News. I'm not sure which is the service providing these feed lists, but they are definitely useful:

Generated feeds for 'linux'

Importing feeds from various websites

The 'export' function allows not only to export feeds, but also preferences and labels.

RSSOwl also allows to search the news feeds, and it supports wildcards like ? or * for a more powerful search. The fullscreen mode (F11) is also available.

The configuration window allows to customise the internal browser, feeds (update interval, sorting, display method, when to delete old news), notifications, labels, sharing and view modes. RSSOwl can also be integrated in the system tray.

One of the minuses I could catch was that RSSOwl will fail to fetch and display feeds which contain some invalid code, although other feed readers like Akregator or Liferea show them.

Sharing news - many popular networks are supported

Except for refusing to fetch certain feeds (which can be a big minus), RSSOwl is a complete and powerful feed application who deserves a try and easily competes with readers like Akregator or Liferea.

Official website
Install RSSOwl 2.0.1 in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic: See this article

1 comment:

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