Monday, March 19th, 2007, 7:39 am
RSSOwl and Thunderbird
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I am having some bitter-sweet feelings as I make a certain change. And this change is an easy one to make. Apart from taking my Web-based mail back to the desktop, I have also begun migrating my RSS feeds from RSSOwl to Thunderbird 1.5.x. It saddens me. I have been with RSSOwl for almost two and a half years. I contributed a little bit to the project, wrote about it, and recommended it to people. Having just tested some things in Thunderbird I came to realise that, as a feeds reader, it boasts several features that would greatly help my reading routine.
While I still have RSSOwl (and I might occasionally use it), the move to Thunderbird seems inevitable. But I am only having second thoughts because of export/import issues. Kudos to Benjamin Pasero for a wonderful tool which I may still regularly use. RSSOwl Development has been slow in the past year and I have remained loyal nonetheless. Now I’m just too tempted to ‘change teams’.
Update (the ‘morning after’): After a while of careful consideration, weighing the pros and cons, I decided to use the best of both worlds, at least for now. RSSOwl is good for quick opening of many pages in new tabs, whereas Thunderbird offers nice HTML previews. It also sports retention of old items which otherwise ‘leak’ out of sight. By mixing and relying on the traits of both applications I will probably get the best overall experience. Unless of course they mature to the point where one becomes obsolete and replaceable… let’s just wait and see.
March 19th, 2007 at 9:04 am
Hey,
you might want to have a look at the preview of RSSOwl 2.0 at http://boreal.rssowl.org/
The reason development of RSSOwl 1.x has slow down for the past time is the active development of RSSOwl 2 :).
RSSOwl 2 is not yet supporting all features of RSSOwl 1, but its already a lot richer in some areas (e.g. retention is supported too as in TB). Feedback is welcome at dev.rssowl.org or via mail.
Ben
March 22nd, 2007 at 10:17 am
Thanks, Ben. I very much look forward to this next version, which I knew nothing about.