RSS in the Palm of Your Hand

Palm Infocenter posted a tiny little review of tools you can use to read RSS newsfeeds on the Palm.

Online Readers

I was using Hand/RSS since the very first day they hit the market. Overall, it is a nice application and it performs its basic functions nearly flawlessly. But if you happen to have more than just a few feeds on your list and subscribe/unsubscribe often - help you god with managing all that. The subscriptions dialog is barely useful. Due to the fact that it shows only URLs, all you can see is just a bunch of "...logger.com/xml/rss.xml" strings. Not really helpful! Of course, you can tap on the line to see the details, but to do so just in order to decide which feeds to update, is a real pain. Guys from Stand Alone sent me a version supporting OPML import (thanks, fellas!) and it did make the whole process a bit easier, but I still had to edit my OPML files manually for them to be imported correctly.

People who wrote Ticker obviously had too much free time on their hands and couldn't think of a good thing to do with it. As a consequence, I don't know what good things I could do with their program.

Another choice that was not mentioned in the article is the Bloglines Mobile. It's a version of Bloglines (web-based news aggregator) optimized for smaller browsers. I often use it when I lie down on the couch and don't feel like holding a laptop (which, by the way, gets quite warm after a few hours of browsing).

Offline Readers

After many months of experimenting with different choices I ended up using (almost exclusively) JPluck X in conjunction with the good ol' Plucker. You cannot update the feeds on the go (that's why I still have Hand/RSS hanging around), but it is a lot more manageable, and Plucker as a reader is superior to that of the Hand/RSS. Plus, with these tools you can read sites that do not have RSS feeds.

I don't have personal experience with News Mac 3, but I guess, combined with iSilo, it's not much different from the previous set.

Conclusion

If you have a good stable internet connection on your PDA, I'd recommend pointing your browser to Bloglines Mobile for the best reading experience. If you want to download newsfeeds wirelessly and then read them offline, go with Hand/RSS. If you don't have internet on your PDA or prefer using an offline aggregator for some other reasons, JPluck X + Plucker is the way to go.

Update: Hand/RSS does show feed titles in the Subscriptions dialog. I'll check the OPML import feature tonight to see if I was wrong about the compatibility issue as well.