Feed your inner Ghost!

Stu from BinaryComponents emailed me to let me know about their RSS reader, FeedGhost!

Now, I like to read my blogs. I like to take a little me time in the mornings, you know, make myself a coffee, look in the mirror and repeat 3 times while slapping my face, "You are sensational!", then fire up my RSS reader for a serious bout of blog reading! 

But one of my biggest gripes with RSS readers is they all look pov, and have almost no usability (past listing RSS feeds)! So when Stu gave me the heads up, I immediately downloaded FeedGhost, and the first thing that hit me was (and no, it wasn't my breakfast burrito getting jiggy with my primary latte!!), wow, this is one slick looking app!

But aesthetics aside (because I'm a man who values inner beauty), it has some very cool features including:

  • Tag for later! Yep, as you do the mornin' skim, you can pick the best off the pile, and read them later (when you're more aligned for such things).
  • Multiple Switch'able Views! Way cool feature, you can go from RoN style, to Outlook List and Preview pane view, to full screen with just one click.
  • Email This! Yep, each posting retrieved has a little action bar at the bottom, with the ability to just email it straight to someone (especially handy for echo'ing!).

Now I've only been using FeedGhost for a little while, but one thing I know is, building a good RSS reader is about reliably displaying my RSS feeds in an easy to use UI (most fail on this right off the bat). But building a great RSS reader is about providing me with the tools to manage my reading in a way that suits my style. Tagging, view switching, easy reading'ness, OPML maintenance, email post; are all about lifting my experience past simply reading posts. FeedGhost already feels like it's punching for the "great" category!

And cap it off with the fact that it's written in .NET 2.0, and looks hot! Now, the only thing Stu and the team need to do is get the WPF version cranking ;)