My RSS reader of choice is currently Bloglines; it meets all my needs, is always accessible from any computer/browser I’m using at any point in time, and all the RSS data and fetching processes is conducted by the Bloglines servers. Whenever I can avoid installing another client on any of my computers is a blessing.
Now, if I needed to install an RSS reader, RSSOwl (http://www.rssowl.org) is definitely the client I would use. First off, it’s Open Source and as such is freely available. It’s available for many system architectures I use, such as Linux, Mac OSX, Windows and Solaris, with an emphasis to keep the same look and feel across all of these. The one negative point I have is that being a Java application, it depends on having a properly installed working copy of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) on the computer you intend to install it on.
RSSOwl has a long list of features:
- Import your favorite newsfeeds using the OPML format.
- Bookmark your favorite newsfeeds in nested categories.
- Import Blogrolls into RSSOwl.
- Built-in internal browser to read news that contain HTML.
- Export the content into one of the formats PDF, RTF or HTML.
- Choose between a 2-column and a 3-column layout.
- A lot of search-options make RSSOwl a powerful application to search inside a newsfeed or an entire category.
- The integrated newsfeed-search engine allows to search for newsfeeds by keyword.
- Simply enter the website containing links to newsfeeds into the feed-discovery and RSSOwl will show all the newsfeeds it has found.
- Place RSSOwl into the system tray on minimization.
- RSSOwl is highly customizable. “Preferences” allow to change fonts, languages, colors, hotkeys and a lot more.
All in all, RSSOwl is the feature-rich reader that will definitely become my stand-alone reader of choice, when the need/time for such a thing comes around in my case. Until then, I remain faithful to Bloglines.