rss

My biggest day-to-day gripe about Chrome is its missing support for automatic discovery of Web pages that offer RSS or other subscription services. But Google now has published a document detailing how it plans to address that weakness, though.

"We will autodetect RSS and Atom feeds using the standard autodiscovery tags," according to the developer document about Chrome support for RSS and Atom, a similar technology for letting people sign up for update "feeds" such as new blog postings. "When a feed is available for a page, we will display an RSS icon in the … Read more

Already a well-liked RSS readers for Windows and Macs, NetNewsWire for iPhone is the native companion to an already-brawny Web service. True to its word, the app collects NetNewsReader for iPhone and is a repository for feeds you already subscribe to using one of NewsGator's services. You won't be able to add new feeds from the application interface at this early stage, but you will be able to open an account from the app. The time-strapped can also save posts in a clippings folder for later perusal, and read them in full on Safari.

AP Mobile News Network is one of your better choices for keeping up with the latest news on your iPhone or iTouch. This free, easy-to-use app has a gratifyingly responsive interface that gives you quick access to news headlines, photos, and videos. Headlines are broken down into Top News, Local (you can specify your zip code or use your iPhone's location), Sports, and Showbiz, with further subcategories (for example, baseball, auto racing, hockey, under Sports) that you choose from a slick, sliding horizontal navigation bar. The app also has more categories--like Business, Travel, and Politics--and it's easy to … Read more

Viigo has certainly matured since its early days. While it now grabs weather, financial news, flight status, and sports scores in addition to your news and blog feeds, it's still, at its core, the fastest, most complete RSS reader for BlackBerry. To users' eternal benefit, Viigo makes finding, subscribing to, and adding your own newsfeeds extremely simple with a long list of presets, browsable categories, and a way to add favorite RSS URLs, even from aggregators.

The extra channels to track the weather, flights, and stocks are bonuses, and a testament to the extensibility of Viigo's original engine. … Read more

The world is full of feed readers. Portable FeedReader's claim to fame is its portability, obviously, but there's more to like than just being able to cram it on your USB drive with room to spare.

The program offers a standard RSS feed-reading interface with three vertical panes. One lists the feeds, the second shows the titles of the selected feeds stories, and the third serves as a viewer. Although the panes' width can be changed by clicking and dragging, the viewer pane is a bit narrow to comfortably read a typical Web page story. Portable FeedReader offers … Read more

Sage is a basic RSS feed and news aggregator for Firefox. Its no-nonsense approach and ease of use will appeal to all user levels.

The extension is meshed with Firefox's sidebar. It's very easy to navigate, with buttons for checking and searching feeds, and two view panels. The top panel displays each feed that you're subscribed to, and the bottom panel displays the specific feed headlines. The Options menu gives you display options, and lets you manage your feeds. We were able to easily copy and paste feed URLs and add them to our list of feeds. … Read more

Flickr photos, Twitter and Facebook updates, and RSS stories are depicted as rafts floating along a river in Ziibii's creative iPhone app. You can slow or speed the current by flicking the screen in either direction, or pause at any time to delete or select a "raft." If you tire of the free application's aquatic theme, you can switch to list view to get your headlines oriented vertically, then flick left and right to further browse. To read stories from just one source, tap on Filter to select it. We appreciate the ease of posting headlines … Read more

It isn't so much the technology behind Zumobi's free app Ziibii that refreshes RSS on the iPhone and iPod touch as it is its presentation. Ziibii, which means 'river' in Algonquin*, extends the metaphor to depict posts from your various RSS feeds as rafts floating along a stream of information.

Watching posts float by is fun concept--for a few minutes at least--and one that's heightened by the fact that stories, photos, and friends' status updates appear in random order as a round-up of all your RSS subscriptions.

Ziibii's feed flexibility is good, but not great. Twitter, … Read more

Here's an oldie but a goodie. Feed Rinse is a super simple and user-friendly way to tweak RSS feeds before subscribing to them in your favorite reader tool.

With it you can pick which authors or keywords you want to exclude, giving you complete control over what ends up filling your feed reader. For example, on Webware's RSS feed you could very quickly choose to only get posts about Google (which is possible on our main site using tags), or a handful of keywords at the same time.

As Martin over at Ghacks points out, you could accomplish … Read more