Roy Osherove has a recent blog entry entitled Moving to RSS Bandit: A simple review where he talks about why he's switched his primary news aggregator from SharpReader to RSS Bandit. In his post he asks a couple of questions most of which are feature requests. My questions and my answers are below.

The Feed tree can only be widened to a certain extent. Why is that?

I'm not sure about the answer to this one. Torsten writes the UI code and he's currently on vacation. I assume this is done so that you can't completely cover one panel with another.

Posting to my blog from it

You can post to your blog from RSS Bandit using the w.bloggar plugin developed by Luke Hutteman. I've assigned a feature request bug to myself to ensure that this plugin should be installed along with RSS Bandit.

a "blog about this item" feature which automatically asks you what parts of the item you'd like to be inserted into the new blog post (title,author name, quoted text...)

Once the ATOM effort produces decent specs around a SOAP API for posting to blogs and the various blogging tools start to support it then this will be native functionality of RSS Bandit. No ETA for this feature since it is dependent on a lot of external issues.

I can't wait for the search folders!

Neither can I. This feature will definitely be in the next release.

Pressing space while reading a long blog post does not scroll the explorer pane of the post(unless it is focused), but automatically takes you to the next unread post. I wish that would behave like SR where it would scroll the post until it ends and only then take you to the next one

I'll mention this to Torsten when he gets back although I'm sure he'll read this entry before I get to.

I wish there was an ability to choose whether you can order the feed tree alphabetically or by a distinct order the user wants (like SR)

I've always thought this was a weird feature request. I remember Torsten didn't like having to implement it and the main justification for having the feature I've heard from a user is satisfied with Search Folders.

For some reason, some of the posts are blue and some not. What does that mean?

Blue means they contain a link to your webpage [as specified by you in the preferences dialog]. It's a handy visual way to determine when posts link to your blog. Again, this functionality is probably superceded by Search Folders.

I'd like to know how far down the feed list is the updating process when I press the "update all feeds" (a simple XX feeds left to update should do)

Another feature request for Torsten. I do like the fact that we now (in current builds not yet publicly released) provide visual indication of when items are being downloaded from a feed and when an error occurs during the downloading process.

Why is there a whole panel just for search when all there is is just a small text box? Why not simply put that box on the main tool bar?

The UI work for the Search feature isn't done yet. We will use up all that space once everything is done.

While we're at it, entering text in the search box  and pressing enter should automatically run search( i.e the Search Button should be the default button when the text box is active)

Agreed. This will be fixed.

I'd like to be able to set the default update rate for a category(which will impact all feeds in it) and not just for the whole feeds globally using the main options dialog

This makes sense. However there is some complexity in that categories can nest and so on. I'll think about it.

NO RSS aggregator I've seen yet has been able to do this simple task: in the main .Net weblogs feed, show the name of the post author\Blog name next to the post title. Is this information simply missing from the feed? If not, how hard would it be to implement this?

This information is shown in the Reading Pane. Would you like to see this in the list view? For most blogs this would be empty (since the dc:author & author elements are rarely used) or redundant since most feeds are produced by a single blog.

I'd like to be able to setup the viewer pane to the right, and the posts pane to the bottom left (like in outlook's 2003 default view or like FeedDemon)

This is in the current builds although the feature is hidden. You have to right-click on the 'Feed Details' tab. I plan to talk to Torsten about making this a toolbar button like in Outlook/Outlook Express.


 

Sunday, January 4, 2004 5:51:52 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I would like to second the request for non-alphabetical listings of blogs.

The reason is simple: there are some catagories that have lots of blogs in them. Some of these blogs are more important to me thus I put them at the top so I can get to them quickly if I dont have a lot of time to read.

This is the main thing that keeps me from switching from Sharp Reader.
Monday, January 5, 2004 5:32:40 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Dare: "No ETA for this feature since it is dependent on a lot of external issues."

Any chance you could implement something similar to FeedDemon's Blog This Item? It sidesteps the whole issue of APIs by simply launching a browser with a user-defined URL containing variables like $ITEM_TITLE$ and $ITEM_LINK$.

Example (ignore line breaks):

http://foo.com/blog/blogpost?
title=$CHANNEL_TITLE$&link=$CHANNEL_LINK$&
ititle=$ITEM_TITLE$&ilink=$ITEM_LINK$&
ibody=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION$

Frankly, now that I've tried FD's approach, I doubt I'll ever go back to an API-based posting mechanism... Atom, Metaweblog, or whatever.
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