Dear Safari RSS Team
Dear Safari RSS team,
Updated 2005/08/01 with thoughts on Flagged vs. Star Ratings
I’ve been using your cool RSS aggregator for a while now, and while it’s really quite good, there are a couple of things you could do to make it really kick ass.
- Have a “new items only” view – rather than just sorting by New, or sorting by Date, or filtering by “last 7 days” – just show me the new stuff. I’ve got like 15,000 items that appear to get loaded every time I check my feeds. That would drop down to just a hundred or two if I could limit to “New only”. The “Today” filter doesn’t cut it – what if I miss a day? What about Monday mornings? Vacation days? “Last 7 Days” isn’t granular enough. A “New Items” filter should be possible, with the SQL Lite engine storing the feeds and items…
- Let me collapse/expand entries – sure, the slider dealie to set displayed article length is nice, but what if I could set items to show title only by default, and just twiddle a little knob on the items that I want to read more about to view the full content – without having to affect the displayed article length of every other item on the page
- Make Safari’s scheduled RSS updates actually, you know, run on a schedule. Often I find that Safari’s forgotten to update for a couple of hours (or it refuses to update after launching, even if it’s the first run of the day). Seems like clicking on my “feeds” folder in the Bookmarks Bar and causing it to start loading the feeds seems to trigger an update. It’d be nice if I didn’t have to babysit an automated update though.
- It’d be really nice if I could override the default “Remove Articles” setting – so I could set it to automagically purge items after a couple of months, but I could set a feed (or folder of feeds, or whatever) to keep items for a different period (shorter, longer, infinite, whatever). I know it’d be a bit more confusing for the UI, but if I could “Get Info” on a feed, and have access to the settings there, it wouldn’t be in any newbies’ faces…
- While I’m at it, why can’t I “Get Info” on any bookmark and add additional information? Have it capture the text of the page for searching by Spotlight? Add additional keywords/tags to a bookmark (you know, like the Finder’s “Spotlight Keywords” field) – personal folksonomies in my Bookmarks…
- How about a “Flagged” bit on a blog entry? With a corresponding “Flagged Items” filter view? Makes it much easier to find stuff that I’ve found interesting before, and kinda makes the persistent store of feeds and items, you know, useful…
OK. That’s it for now. Keep up the great work. If there’s anything I can do to help out, just give me a shout.
Update: Just had a “duh” moment – instead of just having a “flagged” bit (which is by definition a binary toggle), what about following iTunes and iPhoto by having star ratings for feeds and items? Then I could filter on previous items that were ranked 3 stars or higher… Actually, following the iTunes/iPhoto model for “get info” would work as well – being able to set multiple DublinCore-ish fields to help find stuff later…
What about syncing read rss items through .mac between machines? That way that 300 articles I browsed through at work aren’t flagged as new when I get to my home machine.
As a substitute for flag items, here’s a little trick I came up with. Create a folder on your bookmarks bar next to your RSS feeds folder and call it something like “Clips.” Then, whenever you want to “flag” an entry to remember it, just drag the headline into the Clips folder.
New Items! Yes. This would be most excellent
Jason: iSync would be cool… Right now, I’ve got RSS updates turned off on my desktop machine, so only my Powerbook (which is always with me) will update.
Mark: That’s a good trick! I’ll try that. Didn’t even think of the drag/drop thing, but of course that would work…
A bit more kludgey UI-wise (drag a link potentially across the full height/width of the screen, and hit a small target with it, rather than click “Flag” or something…)
Heh, D’arcy, amost all of your required features are already implemented in our project — BlogBridge. You have just been looking in wrong direction.
Give it a spin!