So I decided to try RssBandit again, as I do every now and then. I liked their boasts of lower memory usage because SharpReader can be a bit of a pig - it's running at 88mb at the moment. Unfortunately it looks like I'll still be staying with SharpReader. Within minutes the RssBandit GUI had locked up on me. I clicked on a feed that it had not yet retrieved the items for and it seemed to lock the GUI while it tried to fetch the feed - which it couldn't because the site was down. This gives a terrible user experience. The first thing users do when first installing a piece of software is click around - explore the GUI and the options and see what they can do. For RssBandit to freeze during this is unacceptable.
The status bar of the application includes a resize widget. This, unfortunately, does not let you resize the window. This gets me over and over again. D'oh!
I was reading a code project article in the reader pane, and for some reason the comments view doesn't work properly inside RssBandit. I guess it uses it's own browser string which CodeProject doesn't recognise and therefore disables the DHTML comments. Anyway, I tried to open it in a new window and RssBandit opened it internally again. So I clicked close on the tab that was loading and suddenly RssBandit started opening hundreds of internet explorer windows. I had to kill iexplore.exe and RssBandit via task manager to save myself! Scary...
Rants out of the way, I do like the fact that I can alter the reading layout to look like Outlook (wide-screen) and that I have more control over the fonts to display the GUI with. The defaults in SharpReader are better than those in RssBandit but I've changed them to remove bold and bright red - a much more soothing user interface. I would like more colour choice in the font choosers but you can't have everything! I also like the fact that there's a bundled set of XSLTs to control the display of each item.
Posted by Simon at February 23, 2004 12:36 PM