Dear RSS Owl team,

Firstoff, thanks for the nice project. I'm rather a new owl user, however gave it several shots during the past months.

Also, I apologize upfront for all 'shoulds' in this post - it's all ment as friendly and constructive feedback.

The feedback here is for the (todays) latest snapshot:
- 1.2.1 RC2 2006-05-15 (Windows; U; en)

I'd like to share my experience with the devs from the point of view of a 'new' user.

The inferface is really pretty, for me the first steps weer very easy and simple.

• I didn't like the preinstalled Feeds
  (first thing I do with all RSS readers I used so far - delete the existing ones)
  I'd like to optionally don't install any example feeds at all.

• I miss a Toolbar Button for CTRL-Shift-R (Reload all Favorites). It's the hotkey I used most because whnever a got a coding break I'd love to see what happend meanwhile.

• Options / Favorites: Update automatically: [] on Startup doesn't seem to override existing (but never changed) favorites.
  I had to check the Feeds specific option for all. A button 'apply to all existing feeds' would be nice.
  Some windows apps I use got this 'gray' checkboxes for 'use default setting) - not sure if it's good Application Design)

• Options / Format NewsTip: HTML Format Mail is hard to guess what it does.

• Options / View: View Newstext in Browser: Unsure what it does - it seems to change the preview of the <description> bit. I assume it's either plaintext or html preview?

• Options / View: Show Newsfeed Info: Unsure what it does

• Options / View: Display errors in the tabfolder (what is a 'tabfolder' ?)

• Options / Browser: Use external Browser is the last option and under misc. I did somewhat expected this to be on top and if not checked all other fields grayed out.

• 'Quickview' Toolbar is actually 'Address Toolbar'?

Feature Suggestions:

• Option to disable the 'Newstext' pane.
• Selecting a category should limit the search to the child feeds
• Option to display the different Feeds at the same Tab (this would let you use Browse quickly through the feeds with 'one click' option)
  or
• Option to have a separte pane for the Items in a Feed
  or
• Option to just use two tabs (one for the feeds, one for the links)

The last three options I a rather big wish - all my owl sessions ended up with like 10-15 tabs. I always felt a bit 'messy' after reading news of 5 feeds. E.g. shift key or similar could still open links in new tabs.

best,
frame

Oh my.. bad spelling up there.

wish there was an edit button

best,
frame

Hey Ben,

> At least its present in the toolbar
> under the "Favorites" dropdown.
> That contains all actions that affect
> all "Favorites".

Aye, altho - I'm sticking to the hotkey now :)

After playing around all evening with RSSOwl I ended up to turn off the toolbar all together. Guess I'm a hotkey fanatic.

Thanks for explaining the different things I bumped into.

> Btw you can disable the Tabfolder at
> all in preferences if you want to avoid
> the clutter of Tabs.

Yes, I'm using it actually now as default setting.

In case you wanna know: I ended up in 'use remote browser' with 'no new tab creation', 'disable tabs' and use 'one click' interface.

> Please file seperate feature reuqests
> for your suggestions.

Done. Sorry for posting them here.

best,
frame

Thanks for your feedback. Comments in order:

• Sample Feeds: Thats right, but I think I made it quite easy to get rid of this preinstalled feeds by grouping them into a folder called "Samples".

• At least its present in the toolbar under the "Favorites" dropdown. That contains all actions that affect all "Favorites".

• Good idea @ Apply to all. Will make a note on my side.

• Display News in browser is, when enabled, showing the News in a Browser, compared to showing plain text in a normal text-widget

• "Show Newsfeed Info" is the box on top of the Newsheader Table that expands when you click it to show additional info about the newsfeed.

• Tabfolder: A Tabfolder is containing a list of Tabs. Each feed you open results in a new Tab of the Tabfolder. I think its a pretty common word. Firefox has it too btw, as well as all other Browsers I can think of.

• Options / Browser: Use external Browser - good point, I will investigate what to do there.

• Please file seperate feature reuqests for your suggestions.

Btw you can disable the Tabfolder at all in preferences if you want to avoid the clutter of Tabs.

Ben