I’ve always used SharpReader for aggregating RSS feeds, but after a recent debate at work I’m finding myself trying two new programs. Problem is, I can’t decide between them 
The two that I’m trialling are RSSOwl and RSS Bandit (A somewhat dubious name, which I’m sure is no mistake!). I love Owl’s look and feel, but wish it had the unread news and newspaper view format of Bandit. Both are free and OSS.
Searching on Google, RSS Bandit seems to be the most used/recommended, but I just wish it didn’t have that Office 2003 look compared to RSSOwl’s clean, stylish, FireFoxy interface.
Update: Well, I’ve ditched RSSOwl in favour of RSS Bandit. Bandit is a bit more polished in terms of it’s functionality, even though I’m not keen on it’s UI.
Weird, neither load any feeds for me at work. We have some web censorship software running here, but I don’t see why it would block http requests to non-explicit content. Bummer.
I agree though, RSSOwl does look infinitely better than the alternative.
Jay, perhaps your firewall/proxy at work requires authentication. There should be configuration options in the software for that.
Most of the web is browsable normally, except for certain types of sites, i.e. pornographic, or personal hosting (geocities, etc). We have no control over the proxy, that’s managed by IT.
Ah, got it, it needed configuring with the proxy details, my bad
Thanks David!
No probs
So in what ways is RSS Bandit better than SharpReader?
I found Sharpreader to be a good, lightweight, reader for many years. There’s nothing wrong with it, although the MSN messenger style popups used to annoy me a bit (RSS Bandit uses the standard system tray popups, which is better for me).
The clincher for me though is also what differentiated RSS Bandit from RSS Owl… The newspaper style view This is where RSS Bandit shows every single unread news item (in full, not just headlines) on one page. It used to take me a long time (and many mouse clicks) to read through every feed in Sharpreader, but with RSS Bandit I can do it very quickly, since I can scan down what is effectively just one long, well formatted, web page.