GreatNews - great & free RSS reader for Windows

[Colin Dunstan]

Found this one this morning over at jkontherun. GreatNews looks like it could eventually replace my currently favorite RSS client, FeedDemon. It has a few great features that FeedDemon misses, such as.

- a real database (SQLite), muuuuuuch better for performance and stability than the single file format used by FeedDemon
- tree-hierarchy... as much as I love FeedDemon, I hate how it groups channels instead of offering the standard tree hierarchy we know of Windows applications
- it's free!

Make sure to check out Alex's first findings on this tool.

And it doesn't require the .NET framework, which I personally detest. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

You can get nightly builds from here.

[Alexander Turcic]

Excellent find, Colin! I already installed it and loaded my OPML list (500+ channels) into it. Unlike FeedDemon, which becomes more unusable the more feeds you add, the amount of feeds leaves GreatNews totally unimpressed! Here are my first findings:

Things I like:
- faaast, even with my 500+ feeds!
- CPU/memory resource-friendly
- doesn't require .NET framework
- uses SQLite database instead of flat files (which is the main reason for speed)
- tree hierarchy
- supports CSS style sheets
- displays errors while downloading feeds (marking them red)
- RSS links can open in external browser such as Firefox
- tight Bloglines integration
- News watches (lightning fast!) - also colors keywords automatically
- Bookmark support (called labels here)

Things I don't like:
- doesn't support 304 conditional-gets (BAD!)
- doesn't support gzipping (BAD!)
- stops on invalid feeds instead of giving the user the option to ignore error
- doesn't allow to specify feed-individual update intervals
- doesn't support more complex style sheets (XSL)
- doesn't filter potentially dangerous html tags? (java scripts, etc.)
- doesn't support unrecognized feed encodings
- still has trouble with some feeds
- rudimentary connection settings (no proxy support, no way to control amount of max connections or time-out values)
- doesn't support favicons
- doesn't integrate with blog software
- search news item doesn't work? (strg+h)

[Laurens]

I like this app as well. However, the site only says "free beta". There is no mention of whether the 1.0 will still be free. There's no mention of the software being free in the license either.

[Alexander Turcic]

True true... looks like its free at least in its current state.

[maceyr]

Looks very nice and I kind of liked it, until I figured out that it uses Internet Explorer to display the news. I try to stay away from anything that uses IE due to the security risks of getting trojans, viruses, spyware, etc. I doubt it will take long before you could get viruses and all those nasties via rss feeds. Until they make it render via Firefox, I doubt I'll look too much into it.

[Alexander Turcic]

I have been in contact with Jack, the author of GreatNews. He says that his feed reader is currently freeware, but he intends to commercialize it once it becomes stable. Fair enough!

Great news (pun intended) is that he is now working on support for 304-conditional gets.

[Alexander Turcic]

Update on GreatNews:

Jack added support for '304 http conditional gets' and ' http gzip encoding'... took him less than two days, how cool is that?!

http://www.curiostudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=271

[newsapple]

You can configure greatnews to use firefox by option–>usability. Tick box before ‘open rss link in external default browser’.
As in your case, firefox is your default one.

You can also use it as outlook style by ticking view–>news list.
After that, once you click on a special feed, you will see all the news you received was displayed in a pane one by one as every single email item looklike.

[Alexander Turcic]

Thanks for the hint.

Greatnews is my favorite feed client now and has recently kicked the crown off from FeedDemon (at least for me).

[maceyr]

Great! Thanks for the tip! Looks like it now I can easily check my Bloglines account and view everything in GreatNews. Cool! It would be excellent if even the actual RSS feeds would be rendered in Firefox (instead of IE, which it still is), meaning that my extensions (ie. AdBlock) can be applied. Nowadays, many feeds offer Ads and Adblock is nice in that I can block them if I need to. And, of course, rendering even the feeds in Firefox hopefully is more secure than in IE.

Now, because I'm so used to viewing stuff in Bloglines, where I can easily select a folder, say Breaking News and can scroll down through ALL the feeds without having to keep clicking individual subfolders, say, BBC, and then Reuters, etc. That's the great thing about Bloglines that I love so much. I simply click on My Feeds and it will show all the unread feeds. I simply just scroll through them all. No more clicking individual folders or subfolders. That's one thing I don't like about many other newsreaders.

Maybe Great News may consider my suggestion. Looks good, especially now that I view in Firefox.

[Alexander Turcic]

You may want to visit the GN forums. The lead programmer has been very responsive to all suggestions: http://www.curiostudio.com/forum/index.php