Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Andrew over at Treonauts has a nice rundown of a PalmOS newsreader called Quick News. This was the possible “killer app” I was hinting about previously, and I myself wanted to write a review up eventually, but other things got in the way and frankly my overall opinion of it declined a bit as I continued working with it. I’ll try to supplement Andrew’s excellent review with a few thoughts of my own, but before I do that, I want to briefly go over some issues with another newsreader that relates to my overall effort to find a solution to the “portability” of this new type of application.

In the first place, the newsreader that I have come to know and love that I use on my home and work PC is Bloglines. This is a web-based newsreader, and while there are others out there, to my knowledge Bloglines is still the only one that allows you to hold large archives of old news articles. It doesn’t just retrieve the last X number of posts specified in the feed itself. Instead I believe it actually archives the content so that if you don’t check a feed for a week or two, you could have hundreds of entries piled up waiting for you and not just the last 20. Perhaps not everyone cares about this, but I find it very useful to be able to go back and see if there was anything I missed that I really want to read.

While Bloglines is “portable” in that you can access it from whatever computer you are on that’s connected to the internet, the problem is accessing it from devices that don’t have full browser implementations. For this reason Bloglines has a “mobile” version that is dumbed-down a bit to allow for mobile use. For example, it doesn’t use frames or JavaScript which many phone web browsers don’t support. This would be a fine solution but Bloglines for some reason set things up so that once you access a given feed, just as the regular version it automatically marks everything as read. That’s fine except that if there are 20 entries and I only have time to look at 5 of them, I need some way to tell Bloglines that I want to keep the rest unread. In the regular Bloglines there are a couple of ways to do this, but there is no way in the mobile version!

This problem has become increasingly annoying to me because I’ve emailed them (without a response) and posted on their discussion forum. Other members have responded, saying that they agree and find this a critical feature, but the only thing we have gotten from the folks at Bloglines about this is absolute silence. I’m a web developer myself and while I don’t know much about Bloglines backend, I bet you I could actually create this feature myself given a couple of hours. It’s just not, I don’t think, a very time-consuming request.

Quick News is by a company called Stand Alone which previously made the only full-featured newsreader for PalmOS called HandRSS. Quick News is really a whole new application. So many new features have been added. Honestly for me it took a while to become familiar enough to use it comfortably. Part of this has to do with some features that seem to me to indicate that it might do something similar to Bloglines in allowing you to keep old articles. But after playing with it for a couple of weeks, I could not get this to work and an email to Stand Alone confirmed that the current version didn’t do this but a future version might.

Other than the slightly unintuitive interface which means that you just need to spend a little more time playing with this powerful application before getting comfortable, my only other major issue with it was related to some stability issues. In particular it seemed that a lot of the time when it was downloading or importing news into the program, it would crash. Going back into the program, it would then try to re-import the news it hadn’t succeeded doing the last time and would crash again. Catch 22. I ended up finally figuring out that I could watch the display as it imported and determine the last feed it was trying to import when it crashed and then go and delete the two files for that feed. I have no idea what makes it crash – maybe some odd characters in a feed? Who knows? If you know what to do you can avoid it, but it’s still a bit of a pain.

The nice thing is that Stand Alone is constantly coming out with enhancements and bug fixes and as I was researching this article I noticed that there were two updates posted after the last one I downloaded just a few weeks ago. So perhaps the bugs I’ve mentioned have been gotten rid of, we’ll see.

The only issue for me is that it doesn’t allow archiving old messages, and also it seems that the files that contain each feeds’ content can only reside in main memory and not on the external card, something that would be crucial if you wanted to hold onto archives of lots of feeds. The other problem for me relates to how you mark things read. You can mark an entry read and even delete it, but the next time you go to update your feeds, it will simply overwrite this with what’s currently in the feed (which could include entries you’ve already read and even deleted).

Nevertheless, Quick News is simply the only option out there for PalmOS handhelds/phones unless you want to use web-based solutions like the (flawed) Bloglines or a subscription to a fee-based service like Newsgator. Its features are growing and hopefully it’s stability is increasing, this despite the lack of any competition, so I’ll forgive Stand Alone for their somewhat sluggish response time to inquiries (several days). At least they did respond, which is better than I can say for Bloglines after waiting for a response from them for months!