I downloaded the 15 day trial of PulpFiction, the new RSS/Atom Feed Reader from Freshly Squeezed. I then spent a few hours using the in-built filters to sort the 71 feeds I currently subscribe to. Importing the feeds from NetNewsWire Lite was as simple as exporting and importing the OPML file. Filtering is just like the feature in Mail.app, and did take some time to organise. It’d be nice to see a drag and drop feature for filtering, but I guess the pain is at the start and sorting from now on will be much quicker.
First impressions :
Mail Like Interface. I love the look. Organising it like Mail.app is a winner for me, given that I’ve used it for over a year now it’s all nice and familiar.
Bugs. A few bugs still seem to exist. The messages window snaps back to the highlighted post when you scroll down the list. If you close its inbuilt browser window and it’s downloading something, like a large MPEG, it won’t close the connection, continuing the download in the background. That’s not good when you closed it in the hope it would stop downloading. It only seems to stop when you close the whole application.
Cascading Style Sheets. Using CSS to transform the way the posts are viewed is cool, it makes it much easier to digest each article, fun and personal.
Labels. I’m not sure if I’ll use Labels. I don’t use them anywhere in OS X, and given I filter feeds into folders I’m not sure how it’ll be handy. I’m keeping it in mind though.
Search. I haven’t needed to do a search yet, but I’ve no doubt this feature will come in handy.
Persistent Storage. I love the idea of storing old feeds. We’ll see the impact it has over the next few days. I’m hoping that it will remember all the feeds I’ve read and not duplicate articles like NetNewsWire does sometimes.
AppleScript. The AppleScripts made available will be worth keeping an eye on.
Speed. Most noticeable is the speed. At times it is very slow, even hanging occasionally. No doubt it is a bug because I can’t see how only 71 feeds is overloading it, and it happened before I started to use filtering which would be the main CPU hog. This could unfortunately ruin usability for me.
Everyone knows that 1.0 releases should often be avoided because of prevalent bugs. Especially when money is involved. Saying that, I’m in two minds whether I’ll buy a license just yet, or go back to NetNewsWire Lite. I love the new features, but if it continues to be as slow as I’ve noticed I’m not sure I’ll be able to bear with it. It might be worth waiting for a later version. I’ll give it a few days.
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