Finally, a news aggregator on Windows just for me!

Finally, a news aggregator on Windows just for me!

Monday, April 19, 2004

I primarily use a Windows machine for work and play and for the most part, I like the greater number of options I have for tools and software on Windows. However, I have not been able to find a decent news feed aggregator for Windows. I had been using NetNewsWire on OS X which I think is hands down the best news aggregator available. Not only does it provide feed organization in a tree format, but it also aggregates all of the feeds in a folder, so you can quickly see what is new in that folder. Finally, it is hands down the fastest aggregator (that I have come across) on any platform.

Since I switched back to Windows, I have been searching for a decent replacement for NetNewsWire, and haven’t had much luck. I did find a number of projects that organized feeds how I wanted, but they were all written in C#, and the performance was horrible (aggregating about 250 feeds). I also checked out Feed Demon, which is a super fast aggregator, but does not organize feeds how I want.

Well, I have been playing around with News Gator, and it appears to offer everything that I want. It is integrated into Outlook (could be a plus or minus) and is very configurable and customizable. It allows me to set up and organize my feeds exactly how I want. The performance is not too bad, although, overall it is a little on the sluggish side. It looks like I might be able to finally keep up with all of the feeds again!

It also has support for adding plugins written in C#, which means if it doesn’t do something thatI want, I can just add the functionality myself.