News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

May 7, 2006

internet

NewsGator is making me cranky

Posted May. 7, ’06, 9:37 PM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Internet

NetNewsWire The biggest new feature of the upcoming NetNewsWire 2.1 release is NewsGator syncing. Turn it on and instantly the read status of all the items of your multitudes of RSS subscriptions gets synced to all your Macs running NetNewsWire, your PCs running FeedDemon, a web interface, and even a mobile interface.

However, when the underlying service structure (which not only syncs, but actually feeds the desktop clients) goes out to lunch as often as NewsGator has in recent history (though it’s still not as bad as Bloglines with its lame plumber graphic which inspired pure rage in me), it completely defeats the purpose. In the last couple months, there have been several straight up outages. Brent Simmons went to work on the problem in order to find a somewhat workable solution.

Today though, the outage was a strange one. Select feeds started displaying the URL of the source article instead of the description field of the feed (that’s where all the article text is). This was a problem with NewsGator’s service and not NetNewsWire. As a result of the fact that the service was still returning something that looked valid, there is no way for NetNewsWire to automatically recover and download from the sources directly. Bummer. A whole bunch of users have already raked the company over the coals for this and they’ve fixed the problem (for now), I’m beginning to miss the idea of NNW syncing that happened over Apple’s Sync Services and still downloaded feeds straight from the source.


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