NewsFeed 2.14

NewsFeed is an RSS/RDF/Atom reader and aggregator for UNIX-like operating systems, such as FreeBSD, Linux, or MacOS X, as well as Windows.

It is written in Python and uses Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser for downloading and parsing feeds.

NewsFeed aims to be easy to setup and use and is something of a clone of NetNewsWire Lite (though admittedly not as Aqua-pretty). It only depends on Tk, no other libraries are required.

NewsFeed provides keyboard shortcuts for all safe actions. One can cycle through new items with the Space key, mark all items in a feed as read with m, and open an item in the browser by pressing o (or Return).

Update intervals and caching times can be set on a per-feed basis. Autodiscovery of feeds is supported.

For dealing with feed://-URIs a helper script is provided.

Searches are possible, with search results being shown in the feed list like a regular feed and they are also updated live. This is a good way to look group topics from different feeeds. Use "Unsubscribe" to delete a search, just as you would remove a normal feed.

Here are some key features of "NewsFeed":

· No installation required.
· Easy to sync state between different machines, independent of machine architecture.
· Keyboard shortcuts for all safe functions.
· Live searches in the vein of smart playlists in iTunes.
· OPML import and export of subscriptions.
· Simple HTML rendering (i.e. no annoying color schemes, text always of readable size, etc.).
· Adjustable font size as in Safari.
· Stable — no crashes or core dumps, ever.
· Browser-like back button.
· Can be run from a USB flash drive.
· Can watch regular web pages for changes.
· Talk Digger support.
· Items can be marked as important (these items will not expire).
· Refresh intervals can be made as short as desired, e.g. every ten or twenty seconds.
· Handles RSS 2.0 enclosures.
· Easy export, for example to mail clients like KMail or other programs that have command line options for grabbing content from a file.
· Remembers its window position and size. (Not such a biggie, but far too many programs still don't do it.)
· Works tranparently with proxies, thanks to Python's urllib module.
· Tk GUI is pretty fast.