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RSS/RDF/Atom Aggregation in KDE 3.4

Posted by michael on Fri Jan 14, 2005 02:21 PM
from the news-junkie dept.
GUI KDE
comforteagle writes "With KDE 3.4 beta just announced a few days ago spokesman George Staikos has written about the new RSS/RDF/Atom Aggregator included in the new release, aKregator, in his column KDE: From the Source. 'In contrast to a news ticker style of RSS application, you don't need to constantly look at aKregator to see if there is new news. I have found that with news tickers such as the applet in KDE, I was constantly staring at the news feeds as they scrolled by and re-reading the same headlines over and over. With aKregator, I find I never look at old news as headlines that are read are conveniently grayed out and pushed down the list.' This is a much better way to track news in KDE than the somewhat outdated news ticker."
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  • Why is everything getting an aggregator? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 14 2005, @02:22PM (#11365584)
    I mean... really. My browser, my email client, now desktops... sheesh... How long until we have Solitaire with RSS support?
    • Are you really complaining that you have a choice to use a RSS client where ever it works best for you?
        • Then use only one. I'm sure you don't use 90% of the drivers in the Linux kernel, or all of the protocols in the TCP/IP stack, or every single e-mail client that exists. All this does is give you the choice to use one that works for you. Need to see RSS feeds when you check your email? Fine. Want to see it when you use your IM client, ok no problem. Want to see it in a bar when you browse. Done. Want to see it on your desktop as you work. Then use it there. Just because you can use it in 143 different place

    • Solitaire with RSS support? Certainly - the current solitaire games are pretty boring. Make the game background to resemble a normal desk, add some decorative pictures of normal everyday solutaire-playing-desk objects, like coffee mugs and, oh, top of the newspaper peeking from the edge of the window. With actual headlines.

      Feel free to implement. I'm too coffeed today.

    • Unless I can see the same feeds in the same status from any location regardless of whether my home computer or work computer is on or even nearby, it is inconvenient. That's why I use a web-based feed reader such as Feed On Feeds [minutillo.com]. If I go to the nephew's house, I don't have to try to remember all my feeds to configure his aKregator (stupid stupid name, folks) for my tastes. Local aggregators are plain dumb except for those people that explicitly divide their home and work lives and can maintain two or mo
    • Now that you mentioned it on Slashdot in front of a lot of geeks who'd love to do something that bizaare, probably not long at all.

  • Alright alright (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 14 2005, @02:23PM (#11365595)
    Those of you who are going to ignore the article 'kontent' and make wise-'kracks' line up over here.
  • We seem to have had a lot of these around here recently, and I'll be damned if a KDE utility that doesn't start with "K" isn't the most frightening one yet. Okay, it's the second letter, but still...

  • Used this three weeks.. it's good (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Werrismys (764601) on Friday January 14 2005, @02:24PM (#11365611)
    I subscribed security issue related sites, like F-Secure for WinCrap(tm), cert.fi... hell, even Slashdot has RSS feed ;-)

    Works like a charm. It's just that KDE's tight monopolistic ingegration with Konqueror gets in the way.

    Try as I will, I cannot tie Firefox as tightly to KDE as I'd like. Now I end up using lightweight Konqueror for some stuff and Firefox for surfing (familiarity over speed, or something).

  • News tickers have their place (Score:4, Insightful)

    by saddino (183491) on Friday January 14 2005, @02:32PM (#11365734)
    I was constantly staring at the news feeds as they scrolled by and re-reading the same headlines over and over.

    This is really a criticism of application design and not the model per se. If the KDE applet doesn't allow you to "see each item once" then that is probably a good feature suggestion.

    As the developer of an RSS ticker (Tickershock, for Mac OS X [mesadynamics.com]) I find that the happiest users are those who aren't interested in peering at news headlines all day, but rather enjoy the randomness of "catching a good story" every now and then.

    Tickers aren't for eveyone (but neither are email-style aggregators) so if the tickers on CNN/MSNBC/FoxNews/etc. drive you crazy, you're probably right to steer clear of them on your desktop.
    • Agreed. The ticker is not a bad design in itself, but most of them have been poorly designed.

      RSS tickers drove me batty until I found that some remove headlines from the ticker when I mark them "not interested" as well as when I click on them to open a story. Only the headlines I want to keep stay in the ticker.

      PS: For me, it was a very close call between Tickershock [mesadynamics.com] and NewsTicker [nullriver.com], but NewsTicker won. Their site and help are not that informative, but I liked seeing headlines from different sources in d
    • Not to take this discussion too seriously, I find that tickers are one of those classic examples of where design of a real object was taken literally onto the computer screen. Generally speaking, this is ALWAYS a bad idea. Calendars have pages. Computer screens do not. A calendar on a computer should just show all the days in a scroll or some other fashion where the user doesn't have to click back and forth between months to see things.

      In the same respect, tickers exist because of big LED boards. You

  • Ticker is best for me (Score:3, Insightful)

    by m50d (797211) on Friday January 14 2005, @02:39PM (#11365829) Homepage Journal
    I find I can read the ticker "subconsciously" as it were. I notice anything interesting without having to actually look at it, so I just get the news with no extra effort. Plus it's built into my taskbar, so takes up zero screen real estate. I'm sticking with the ticker
  • Well, of course it's outdated!! If they'd only called it KNewstiKker right off the bat, we wouldn't need this new fancy app..
  • I am sure it will end up not having corner alerts just like every other feed reader in existance. On my windows boxes I used to use this app called SharpReader [sharpreader.net] it was a okay app, but the one feature that it had that I love was corner popups. Every time a new article came in a little box came up telling you the feed title and article title. You could then decide if you wanted to read it, if you did you could click on the title and it would bring up the article. I now find my self in linux more than ever and
    • Akgregator uses KNotify, so it has the exact same notifications as every other KDE app under the sun.

      Namely, it can and will do any combination of:
      - Log the event to a file
      - Play a sound
      - Flash the taskbar entry
      - Show a corner popup next to the system tray for 2-3 seconds
      - Pop-up an alert-type dialog that grabs attention
      - Execute any program or script you see fit to give it
    • Try Liferea - the best gnome aggregator IMHO.
      • Holy! This is perfect!!! Liferea fixes both of my issues with straw, better feed notification AND it sits in the system tray instead of my window list. :D Thanks for telling me about this wonderful app.
  • I'm using the aKregator in beta 1 of KDE 3.4 right now. Current version is beta 8, and it is still not good. The one I used untill yesterday (beta 6) had the annoyance that it would stay in the background gobbeling cpu even after selecting quit and it dissapeared from the systray. Beta 8 fixed that, but now clicking the systray icon doesn't work all the time. It says x number of new posts, I click, and absolutely nothing happens. Click-click-click? No. Wait five minutes, and it works again. I suspect it hap
  • as pushing the RSS feeds into inn and reading them with gnus.

  • Already using this in MacOS X (Score:3, Informative)

    by larkost (79011) on Friday January 14 2005, @02:53PM (#11365996)
    I have been using this sort for a system for a while now on MacOS X. I alternate between using NetNewsWire Lite and the built-in RSS checking in OmniWeb. To take the NetNewsWire Lite example:

    I setup the feeds I want to view in NNWL and then leave the application running, but either with the main window closed, or with the application hidden. Every hour it checks my feeds and then puts a badge on its dock icon with the number of changed items. I just right-click (multi-button mouse) on the dock icon and select the items I want to view (and mark-all-read the rest) and they pop up as tabs in my browser-of-choice (OmniWeb in my case).

    Very simple, very quick, and without having anything in the way when I don't want it.

  • This is nothing new (Score:5, Informative)

    by DJStealth (103231) on Friday January 14 2005, @03:03PM (#11366121)
    The RSS plugin for Trillian has been doing this for years. It only pops something up when there's a new piece of news (and appears as a different colour in the list for the first minute of it being 'new').
  • "In contrast to a news ticker style of RSS application, you don't need to constantly look at aKregator to see if there is new news" This is about 2 years behind. No one uses RSS in ticker styles...

  • Oh the humanity! (Score:5, Funny)

    by erikharrison (633719) on Friday January 14 2005, @03:04PM (#11366134)
    aKregator? They put a "K" in aggregator?

    Just stop. Just - just stop. Please.
    • Well, it's a legitimate word in German.

    • Why? Who cares. It's called product branding. Everyone's beloved Apple is as guilty of it as the KDE/Gnome community.
      Does it really cause you that much inconvenience to have it named that? Microsoft gets bitched at because their names are actual words (word, windows, excel) and KDE/Gnome get bitched at because they have a lot of K's/G's in their app names. In the end, who cares what the name is.

      What exactly is a good name in your opinion?

  • stop! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by PerlDudeXL (456021)
    please stop to import more and more third-party kde apps into official kde packages.

    furthermore, stop to keep dupe apps:

    - Noatun / Kaboodle
    - KPaint / KolourPaint

    almost the same GUI and they serve the same purpose. ignoring the little differences now.

    I don't use KDE as my main desktop, but I have KDE installed because I use one or two apps
    and dupe apps are just useless. remove one of them and stick to the most promising.
    • Noatun and Kaboodle are not the same. Noatun is a continous player (playlist, tray icon) while Kaboodle is a lighter weight media player.

      It's like the difference between playing WAV files in Window's 'Sound Recorder' app or 'Media Player' app.

      I've never used the other two apps, but maybe the goal of one of them is to be more gimp-like with features, while the other like Window's Paint.
    • Dude, KPaint is gone. It's not even part of KDE 3.3. KolourPaint was created to replace KPaint.
  • And you dont need KDE!
  • I make it a point to never use software with the phrase GATOR in it.
  • I know the mono project is working on one.

    A dashboard app or ticker with RSS support would be cool or a customable sidebar or background.

    I wonder how hard it would be to write one? I am a little envious of the macosx crowd and WindowsBlinds users.

    Perhaps a todo list that could sync into a pda in teh dashboard app would be cool too.
  • K-Jokes in three, two, ...

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