Wednesday, July 21, 2004

PulpFiction 1.0.1

The initial release of PulpFiction, Freshly Squeezed Software’s news reader, wasn’t usable for me, but the new 1.0.1 squashes bugs and is much faster. I’m not sold on the idea that an Apple Mail–like interface is a good thing, and I don’t think I need its spiffy filtering capabilities. (If they could look at the entire article contents, not just the excerpt, that would be interesting.) That said, I like that the display is customizable using CSS and that it offers persistent storage (of excerpts, not full articles, alas) and full text search. It will be interesting to see how it compares with NetNewsWire 2.0.

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Micheal Jones

FWIW, the actual RSS feeds are to blame for excerpts rather then full articles.

As a RSS content provider one can choose between making the full article available or just an excerpt so people will visit your site if the excerpt is interesting enough.

That's because PF is storing the text that it got from the RSS feed. It could instead download the full article using the permalink from the feed, and store that. There are probably good reasons not to do this, but I do think it would make filtering and search more useful.

Am I the only one who still thinks that the phrase "news reader" means "Usenet client"? Because until you mentioned comparing it to NetNewsWire, I was wondering why/how PulpFiction generates "excerpts" from Usenet posts. :-)

Yeah, I guess I should call it a "feed reader" or something.

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