0xDECAFBAD - Tag: software

Vienna is now my weapon of choice for feeds

2007-01-02T21:37:48+00:00

In the last few days, I've switched news aggregators again - this time to Vienna.

I've got a long, long, long history of doing this - partially because of my serial enthusiasm, and partially because none of the aggregators I've used so far have satisfied all of my itches. Some tie up my laptop in terms of memory and CPU, some aren't fast enough UI-wise to help me really blaze through skimming, and some aren't flexible enough for me to tweak to my particular liking.

At this point, though, Vienna comes really close to what I've been wanting for years. It's open source (check it out!); uses WebKit to offer a theme-able feed item display (hello Colloquy!); and uses SQLite 3 for persistence (with schema documentation!). Out of the box, it's a pretty nice app, but it was even nicer when I started poking under the hood. I've even submitted my first small patch, which got accepted into the codebase.

When last I tried Vienna, it was on my poor old PowerBook G4 12" 867Mhz and it was a somewhat rough and bad tasting experience. At the time, NetNewsWire was my tool of choice, and Vienna was lacking some features - like, say, a user-sortable list of subscription folders and feeds. It also thrashed a lot and generally made me Force Quit it and move on. But now, on my new-ish MacBook Pro, the performance is stellar with my set of 500+ feeds and my few showstopper missing features are no longer missing.

Now, it seems like NetNewsWire is the app that thrashes for me and gets a Force Quit. I need to try NNW a bit more and figure out if it's just my initial import of subscriptions that drags things down - but Vienna's got me now. It's catching up mightily fast with the feature list of NNW. And, nothing beats open source software for tossing in a few tweaks to things that are just not quite doing what I'd like.

Again, since I'm a serial enthusiast, I have no idea if I'll be a regular contributor of patches to Vienna or even offer any commitment to the project - but I'm definitely happy with it at the moment.

Archived Comments

Craig
2007-01-02T22:20:49

Not sure if you care much for web-based aggregators, but ReBlog is my current favorite. I prefer the web-based aggregators because it allows me to have the same feed list between home and work... er, I mean my other home. http://www.reblog.org/ Hope this helps!
jose
2007-01-03T01:36:43

hi les

i had used vienna before, it has more features than NNW that i like (IIRC it had flagging etc), but it had just lousy performance. it consumed gobs of memory and CPU and invariably fell apart under my feed load (over 100 feeds).

i've tried probably a half dozen RSS readers on the Mac and they all stink. i miss RSS Bandit for Windows, which had all of the features i like but sadly runs on windows (which i don't use routinely). :-/

hope all is well.
l.m.orchard
2007-01-03T03:54:01

@Craig: I have tried using BlogLines and then Gregarius... ReBlog i've used before, too, but actually as a sort of newsdesk for a team at work - they skimmed through news stories and flagged items for republishing, which our CMS then plucked out of the outgoing ReBlog RSS feed. Nice aggregator. But, for me, nothing beats a desktop aggregator for swift skimming speed. For what it's worth, the Vienna team is working on BlogLines integration.

@jose: Not sure when you tried Vienna last - it seems to have improved markedly, though that might just be my mileage with the MacBook Pro now.
Michal Migurski
2007-01-03T08:17:14

I almost feel bad for wanting to switch. =)

Vienna is really good.
brian cors
2007-01-03T16:45:29

I checked out Vienna today a bit, and it's mucho nice.

However, the one thing that I use the most on NNW is the ability to sync to NewsGator. I use that on my cell to read feeds when I am out and about, and not at the desk. And that setup is particularly nice because it syncs history between NewsGator and NNW, so I dont end up reading things again that I have already read.

I'll definitely look at this as a freeware feed aggregator to use at work though, on our workstations. I need to get a decent, easy to use one for people here to learn about RSS. This might be the ticket. Thanks for pointing it out!
Adam Lipkin
2007-01-03T23:35:34

I've been a complete Google Reader addict for the last two months (although I also suffer from Serial Enthusiasm). It seems to toe the line nicely between web-based reader and true app, and combined with Firefox 2.0's nice handling of tabs and links (closing an article I head to from Google Read will pop me back to the Reader tab), it's integrated pretty seamlessly into my browsing.
jank
2007-01-08T21:57:02

I'm checking out Vienna, too, but, like Brian, having the ability to sync with a non-mac client (preferably a web-based one) is the biggest thing that NNW has going for it.
l.m.orchard
2007-01-08T22:42:53

Ironically, I've never spent much time with an aggregator that syncs with any other client - web-based or not. So, that's a feature of NNW I've never really appreciated or had much use for. I tend to have a laptop with me at all times, so my aggregator tends to go with me.
Peter Miller
2007-01-11T08:24:55

Thanks for opening my eyes to Vienna. I was using Bloglines for the longest time and never knew what I was missing!

firefox 2.0 ftw

2006-10-08T21:26:04+00:00

Just installed Firefox 2.0 RC 2 this week, and I've got to say that it's pretty keen. Doesn't seem like a revolution in browsers or anything, other than what it already was. But, everything seems tighter, quicker, slicker, and more like a polished product. My CPU usage is flatter than ever before, and it actually looks like I've got some free memory left over after running it for a few days. And this is speaking as an infovore who regularly has a dozen or so tabs open, with a turnover of at least a hundred a day. All the extensions I really care about still work, a few have been forced to work using Nightly Tester Tools. And, one that stopped working (SessionSaver) has now been rolled into the browser itself. Swank all around.

Archived Comments

Mad William Flint
2006-10-09T17:27:40

No Greasemonkey, No installey.

It's pretty slick otherwise. Seems spritely and a tad bit more svelt (I'm noting about 35-40% less memory hoggage.)

But had to revert when greasemonkey died.

i'm in the nintendo ds homebrew club now

2006-09-19T16:16:12+00:00

Passscard is the perfect flash card boot-up solution for DS LITE & NDS . It is compatible with most types of flash cards including M3, Neo, SC & G6 etc.

Source: Divineo.com - Product Information

I've just received a Passcard 3 in the mail. Nintendo DS homebrew, here I come! I'm particularly excited about NitroTracker and ScummVM. Though I've only got a GBA Movie Player and a 128MB CF flash card from a camera, that seems enough to run most of this stuff so far. Unfortunately, it just sticks out from the Nintendo DS Lite by an inch or so - almost half the depth of the handheld itself! I think one of my next purchases may be a more compact and capable SuperCard MicroSD, which fits flush in the Nintendo DS Lite and accepts MicroSD expansion cards.

Archived Comments

foosel
2006-09-24T22:43:08

Congratulations on the Passcard ;) I got one myself a couple of months ago, including a M3 CF, and playing Monkey Island on the DS rocks ;) I have to warn you though concerning SD based units, there were a couple of issues not so long ago with several homebrew apps (including Scumm), and write-support for SD is afaik still rather new in the standard fat-lib used by homebrew devs. So you might want to make sure that your most beloved or interesting apps will actually work like expected prior to spending loads of money.
Adam Mokan
2006-09-28T04:21:30

How does the Passcard 3 fit in the DS? I've heard that its a real tight fit and you really have to force it to "click".

I'm getting ready to break down and buy some homebrew stuff for mine.

It's back to OmniWeb for me!

2005-10-28T16:15:07+00:00

So, after a good solid several months' run with Firefox, the constant CPU drain finally got to me and I've gone back to OmniWeb.

Firefox was regularly tops in the usage list, and usually sits on about 33% of my CPU and a solid majority of my 1GB of RAM—which makes my already-slow 867Mhz machine feel like 300Mhz. That, and I haven't had much time to play with GreaseMonkey for awhile, which was my main reason for switching back to Firefox. So, it's back to OmniWeb for me. And man, already this PowerBook feels like it's been greased and waxed.

(Yes, I need a new machine. But that ain't happening for awhile yet, and for very good reasons.)

Archived Comments

Ryan Schwartz
2005-10-28T17:59:02

Have you looked at Opera lately? I've grown to really like it. Few quirks, but it's just muscle memory things at this point.
D'Arcy Norman
2005-10-28T18:53:01

Yeah - I keep waffling on default browsers. Tried FF for a while, but it was just too kludgey to use full time. Safari rocks, but I've always had a soft spot for OmniWeb. LOVE the tearable textarea element... I'll be trying OW as my default for a few days. Who knows, maybe I'll stick with it this time :-)
John Best
2005-10-28T19:22:55

i use firefox, ie and opera.I love opera but it is harder to use.it is sad that opera will not identify itself as ie or mozilla anymore but still. I am awaiting, anybody got any screenshots.
Stefan Wasilewski
2005-10-28T19:30:22

Install the flashblock firefox extension. You'll find your cpu problems go away.
l.m.orchard
2005-10-28T21:02:52

@Stefan: Oh yeah, I've had that installed for about 6-7 months now, but Firefox is still pretty chugly for me.
Scott
2005-10-29T02:02:56

Have you tried Camino? Most of the sluggishness I've heard reported by Firefox users seems to be tied to the UI? Camino re-wrote the UI using Cocoa.
Aristotle Pagaltzis
2005-10-29T07:07:26

Any Gecko-based browser will be heavy on CPU... I remember when I had my 450MHz PII with 256MB and running Mozilla was an excercise in patience. I took my current 1.533Gz Athlon with 512MB setup for it to feel smooth.
l.m.orchard
2005-10-29T18:07:18

@Scott: Well, I have used Camino off and on. But, for me, the Firefox UI and extensions are kinda the whole point of using it. (ie. Greasemonkey and XUL extensions) I'm not particularly wedded to the Gecko rendering engine, other than being very happy it's around and does the right thing mostly.
Saltation
2005-10-31T01:10:05

browser+ OS will chew about half your ram, plut panther/tiger's bizarre swap setup forces unnecessary paging. try modifying your /etc/rc such that the defaultpager line looks like: dynamicpager -S 20000000 -H 10000000 -L 30000000 -F ${swapdir}/swapfile
Saltation
2005-10-31T01:11:07

now, that's some weird interaction b/w html italics and markdown preprocessing...
Adam Keys
2005-10-31T20:25:36

See, I switched from OW to FF for the reason you're going the other way. I found that OmniWeb was a total bogart on my memory. After I switched to FireFox, that seemed to go away. I think that FF may use more memory over time though; not quite a leak, but it doesn't seem to let go of memory as tabs are closed. I'll give your technique a try tonight I guess. I just wish FF would use the blasted Keychain so I don't have to switch back and forth remembering passwords.