In my quest to see if I can find a feed reader better suited for my needs, I’ve looked at the free and open source Java-based desktop RSSOwl. Currently I’m using Google’s Personalised Homepage (also known as IG from its URL) to track my umpteen feeds (a list which is expanding every day). My requirements for my feed reader are:

• Must be cross-platform - either web based or runs on Windows and Linux (preferably Mac OS X support as well)
• Must be nice to look at whether web-based or desktop - it’s an app I’m going to use a lot
• Must give me an at-a-glance summary of all my feeds as well as a feature to look into each one
• Must have OPML import/export so I can import my feeds not re-enter them all manually
• I must feel comfortable using it (subjective, I know)

So the first solution I decided to try out was RSSOwl. RSSOwl is a free, open source, Java-based desktop feed aggregator. It’s cross-platform as it’s Java-based, but I’ve only tried it out on Linux for now. In theory, the Windows version should be identical in functionality. Read on for the review.

Interface

The main window of RSSOwl on my Linux desktop looks like this (click any image to see full version).

Because of the way Java works on Linux, the interface gets run through a number of libraries before it’s actually rendered on screen. Java’s Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) handles the Java code, which then passes it to GTK - one of the main graphics toolkits on Linux (particularly used in Gnome). I use KDE, however, which uses the QT toolkit, so the GTK stuff is then rendered with my KDE style. By the time the interface has been through all these processes, it doesn’t feel very native compared to my other applications.

This is a Linux-specific issue, though, and I can’t comment on how it looks on Windows and Mac OS X - I haven’t tried them. Googling for images of RSSOwl does give some results, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there.

There’s also a couple of problems I had with RSSOwl - but I don’t know whether these are common or just happened in my case. One is that the frame where the feed content appears displays the raw HTML rather than formatted things. I’m guessing this issue is specific to me - some of the screenshots on Google show fully browser-rendered feed content.

Nevertheless, the interface doesn’t particularly excite me; the colour scheme is a bit too grey for me and the icons are a bit bland. Generally, I think there’s definitely room for improvement in the interface.

Functionality

I’ve been a bit critical so far - don’t get me wrong, RSSOwl isn’t a bad application at all, I just don’t think it suits me at the moment. RSSOwl boasts quite a lot of features. It handles RSS, Atom and RDF in terms of feed formats and it has some cool featurettes. One that’s particularly useful for feed publishers and bloggers is the feed validation function.

It works with a multitude of formats and tells you what you need to do to fix your feed. And, no, I don’t know why the Gizbuzz feed has so many errors. FeedBurner handles the feed anyway, so I don’t know whether this is common to FeedBurner-published feeds.

Adding feeds is really easy. One click on the toolbar’s Add button pops up a simple window where you can enter information. To make it even easier, an extension for Firefox which talks to RSSOwl and allows you to add feeds to RSSOwl from the browser would make the experience that much better.

OPML import and export is included and fully-featured and that allowed me to (fairly) easily import my feeds into RSSOwl and get myself started right away.

Conclusion

I’ve only briefly played with RSSOwl and only on one platform, but I don’t think it’s quite the solution I’m looking for. From what I can tell, it doesn’t have the at-a-glance view that I want - I’ve got so much to track I want to be able to run my eyes down a list and look for the headlines I haven’t seen yet. On Google’s IG this is easy because obviously I can see followed links in a different colour, so I can quickly find fresh content.

RSSOwl has potential - a bit of spit and polish here and there and ironing out some issues (a new icon set please!) and I might come back to it, but RSSOwl doesn’t meet my needs at the moment, so I’m off to find, play with and hopefully review a different solution next time.