In Ubuntu, you had a lot of RSS reader just as: Grr Feed Reader, Yarrsr, Liferea Feed Reader…. I used RSSOwl as my default feed and rss aggregators. RSSOwl lets you gather, organize and search news in a convenient, easy to use interface with endless flexibility.
RSSOwl is a news aggregator for RSS and Atom News feeds. It is written in Java, and is built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform which uses SWT as a widget toolkit to allow it to fit in with the look and feel of different operating systems while remaining cross-platform. Released under the Eclipse Public License, RSSOwl is free software.
RSSOwl collect data from RSS-compliant sites are called RSS readers or “aggregators“. RSSOwl is such an application. RSSOwl lets you gather, organize, update, and store information from any compliant source in a convenient, easy to use interface, save selected information in various formats for offline viewing and sharing, and much more. It’s easy to configure and the best of all: It’s platform-independent.
What makes RSSOwl unique?
- Multi-Platform: RSSOwl can be used on all major platforms like Windows, Linux (32 Bit and 64 Bit) and Apple Mac OS X.
- Possibly the coolest feature of RSSOwl, though, is searching. The app’s got so many ways to search that it’s a little overwhelming at first, but it’s extremely powerful down the line. You can have multiple different conditions to any given search and save your searches—not unlike the “smart playlist” feature of media players—and group feeds by specific attributes. You can also use this as a filter, automatically filing incoming articles into news bins (akin to folders in an email client), marking them as sticky (akin to flagging or starring), or applying labels (akin to…labels) for super organizational powers.
- Support Tabbed Browsing: You can display news feeds side by side in multiple tabs. This gives you a similar user experience you might already be familiar with from your web browser. Of course you can configure RSSOwl to limit the number of opened tabs or to not use tabs at all if you are not a big fan of them.
- Emmbed Browser: RSSOwn ese the embedded Browser to open the full content of a news entry from the originating web site. You can choose Internet Explorer or Firefox as your embedded browser.
- News Bin: You can create any number of News Bins to store news you think are worth keeping. News can either be copied or moved from any feed. With the help of News Filters, you can create rules to automatically move or copy news to News Bins.
- Organizer your feeds with labels and categories: Use Labels to associate keywords with news entries. You can assign any number of labels and create new ones. Each Label has its own color to make it easy to distinguish labeled news from others. RSSOwl has the grouping mode to group a list of news entries from a feed by a specific attribute.
- Import and Export your feeds: You can easily add more feeds to RSSOwl by using the Import Wizard and use the Export Wizard to export your list of subscriptions including saved searches and news bins to a file. In addition to your subscriptions, you can export labels, news filters and settings to easily setup RSSOwl on a different computer.
- Supported Multimedia content: RSSOwl allow you can view Flash, Video, … it’s addition features can add by plugins.
- There are too many features to describe in detail—other highlights include sharing via services including Facebook, Twitter, or Digg, and notifications (that integrate with Growl in OS X)—so check out their full overview for more detailed information.
Ubuntu 11.04 and RSSOwl 2.0.6
As you known, Ubuntu 11.04 has been released on April 28, 2011. It’s has XULRunner 2.0 and it’s not compatible with RSSOwl v2.0.6 so it’s not works on Ubuntu 11.04, how to fix it?
XULRunner versions are not compatible so whenever a new versions comes out, RSSOwl (and others using SWT like Eclipse) are broken. So the easiest fix is to not update XULRunner. Shipping with an own version of XULRunner is a possible solution, however I think you can only have 1 instance of XULRunner registered to the system. Why don’t create a separate version of xulrunner in your computer, it’s can add to RSSOwl as plugged software.
- Download XULRunner v1.9.xx from http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/releases/1.9.x.x.x/runtimes/ you can compile the source or just download the binary files that provide in zip format.
- Unzip your XULRunner that has been downloaded into any folder as you want, I recommend is place it into RSSOwl folder if you using portable RSSOwl.
- Edit [highlight color=”yellow”]config.ini[/highlight] in configuration folder which is stored in RSSOwl folder with the code below:
org.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/your/path/to/xulrunner-1.9.x.x
- Save file, restart RSSOwl
What is your favorited RSS and Feed Reader softwares which you has been used on Ubuntu?