Reviews
Review: NewsGator 2.0
- By Mike Gunderloy
- January 28, 2004
NewsGator 2.0
$29
NewsGator Technologies
Highlands Ranch, Colorado
www.newsgator.com
I mentioned NewsGator 2.0 a couple of weeks ago when they announced the
new version. Now it's out and available for download from their Web
site, so it's time to do a fuller review.
I'm sure I've ranted enough about RSS in the past that most readers know
the basics, but just in case: RSS is a more-or-less standard format that
thousands of Web sites use to distribute headlines and other updates.
These range from weblogs to headline news sites. More and more other
applications are also making RSS feeds available - for example, both my
bug-tracking application (FogBugz) and my source-code control
application (SourceGear Vault) provide RSS feeds of recent activity. To
read RSS feeds, most people use an aggregator: a piece of software that
will poll a user-defined set of feeds at regular intervals, displaying
new items.
NewsGator is an aggregator that runs inside of Outlook. It can display
RSS feeds and NNTP newsgroup messages, and integrates completely
painlessly. I find it's extremely convenient to read new messages from
all sources in a single application, which is why I like NewsGator so
much.
Version 2.0 adds support for some of the latest standards, including
Atom 0.3 and RSS enclosures. There's also a new and more customizable
NewsPage HTML interface for seeing all of your feeds at once, multiple
profile support, and some serious performance improvements. The real big
news for most users, though, is in the new NewsGator Online Services
(NGOS).
NGOS (a separate $5.95 per month subscription service) adds a number of
great features for the road warrior who wants to keep up with RSS feeds
with minimal confusion. For starters, there's multi-machine
synchronization. Load NewsGator on your home and work computers, sign up
for synchronization, and each will know which items you've read at the
other. NGOS also gives you access to your feeds via a web-based reader,
any POP3 e-mail client, or any HTML-capable mobile device. You can also
set up custom search feeds - for example, your RSS reader will retrieve
constantly-updated results of an Internet search for your name, or your
company's name, or whatever you want. NGOS even includes some
customer-only feeds, including ones from InfoWorld and Network
Computing.
Most RSS aggregators these days are free. NewsGator is convenient
enough, and has added enough superior features, that I don't at all mind
paying for it -- and neither, I think, will many other people.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy has been developing software for a quarter-century now, and writing about it for nearly as long. He walked away from a .NET development career in 2006 and has been a happy Rails user ever since. Mike blogs at A Fresh Cup.