Pulp Fiction - A Mail-like newsfeed reader

Mar 17, '05 12:43:00PM

Contributed by: robg

PulpFiction icon The macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[Score: 8 out of 10]

While digging around on Freshly Squeezed Software's site for info on last week's PotW, I stumbled across this RSS (newsfeed) reader called PulpFiction. I have tried a large number of news readers, and there are some very good programs out there. However, I had yet to find one I really liked well enough to use regularly (though I have called a few out with Pick of the Week selections in the past). I found the interface on most programs confusing or too limited, and I couldn't find one that had an easy way to manage the hundreds of stories that accumulate in even a lightly-populated news reader. So in the end, I just went back to browsing sites directly to check for updates. But PulpFiction is different, and unlike any of the other readers I've tried.

PulpFiction basically treats news feeds like mail messages, and has an interface design that is very reminiscent of Apple's Mail app. If you like Mail (which I do), that's a good thing. If you don't like Mail, you probably won't like PulpFiction. And I know that this pick will probably be controversial -- news readers are like Mail clients and calendar applications -- personal preferences come heavily into play. Hence the new poll that went up slightly before this hint! Feel free to add your picks as a comment to this story, of course ... but also vote in the poll for your favorite news/RSS reader. Note that because there are so many news readers out there, I wasn't able to list them all, so you may have to use the "Other" category...

As seen at left (larger version), the main interface is a two-paned window with a drawer. The top half of the window shows the feed headlines, while the bottom shows the selected headline's contents (and is used to display the actual web page as well, if you wish). You can view the full article in many ways with PulpFiction: double-click the headline to open a new minimal browser window within PulpFiction; click the Read Full Article link in the preview area to open the actual web page within that same preview area (that's the view shown in the screenshot), or control-click on the headline and choose to view the article in your external browser.

The drawer section of the interface can either show a list of each feed you're subscribed to, or as seen in the screenshot, a Mail-like folder view. Folders are PulpFiction's method of organizing news feeds. Just like Mail, you've got an InBox, where any unsorted feeds will show, and you can add an unlimited number of additional folders (and sub-folders) to use for organizing your feeds. You can add both normal and smart folders. Normal folders behave just like Mail's folders -- you can add items by dragging, or you can create Filters (like Rules in Mail) that automatically route feeds to a folder.

The real power, though, is found in Smart Folders. Create a new smart folder, and you can gather data from multiple feeds into on convenient spot. For instance, I have a smart folder that looks for the words "Tiger" or "10.4" in any Mac-related feeds' articles, and another that finds any references to OS X in general. Smart folders are a great way to find articles of interest to you, regardless of which feed they're coming from.

The subscription manager in PulpFiction is quite nice, too. The subscriptions window is columnar, letting you easily see info such as feed name, number of articles, last checked, and next scheduled check. When adding new feeds, you can apply a filter to them at the time you create them, which is a great timesaver. So if you're adding a new Mac-related feed, and want it to go into your Mac Stuff folder, you can just tell the feed to use the filter you've already set up to move the other Mac-related feeds. Very slick.

There are a ton of other features in PulpFiction -- you can apply labels to feeds, to help highlight ones you may be particularly interested in, you can set individual update times by feed, an activity viewer shows update activity (just like Mail's activity viewer), and much, much more.

There have been some complaints on VersionTracker about the program crashing, but I've had no such troubles yet -- I've had it running quite often for about a week now on both my desktop and laptop machines. I wish the Smart Folders were a bit smarter -- I'd like to be able to include "and" and "or" in one query. For example, "show me all articles that contain Tiger *or* 10.4, *and* are not from the Golf feeds. As it stands now, it takes two smart folders to execute that search. Also, the program's interface takes a bit of learning, as there are many things that can be set and tweaked. However, I've found it well worth the time I've invested in it so far. I haven't registered yet, but will clearly do so this week -- this is the first time I've found a feed reader that just feels "right" to me, and the added features of the full version make it worth paying for over the lite version.

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Mac OS X Hints
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