Aggregators: Conclusion
Friday, April 02, 2004
In between looking at Sauce Reader, Sharpreader and Syndirella, I looked at pretty much all the other desktop aggregators in the weblog compendium and none of them were as good as these, by a large margin.
All in all, what I’d like from an aggregator is just about covered by these three, but not by any one. The startup speed of the .NET apps is appalling, and the SharpReader toaster effect repels me. The SauceReader UI is just not professional enough. On the other hand, SharpReader is desperately underpowered for such a popular aggregator. It just doesn’t let me do anything – I suspect that this is largely to do with the inoperable browser component (Syndirella’s was the most usable, for the record), but the fact that I can’t even see the source of a feed bothers me too. Comparatively, Sauce Reader provides masses of functionality but could do definitely do with full-on menu and toolbar customisation so we can sort the tools we want to be the most accessible (or copy Syndirella and take the simplistic approach).
And so, in tedious conclusion, if I was thinking about writing a new aggregator, I’d probably start with Syndirella’s model, with something like SauceReader’s functionality as my end goal.