The aggregator back-link said: “ongoing: Our rating: 12.69”. Puzzled, I followed the pointer to BlogBridge, which turns out to be another yet another aggregator, yawn. Except for, that 12.69 rating puts ongoing at #1 on the list of their readers’ favorites. Obviously a bunch of obsessive, pedantic geeks then. But I clicked on Download, and then on Macintosh, and there was a discouraging little note along the lines of “No special Mac packaging, click here.” So I did, and it was a Java WebStart, and soon I was wondering why you’d need “Special Mac Packaging” anyhow, because it downloaded itself and started itself and imported NetNewsWire’s OPML just fine and seems like a pretty slick aggregator. It uses the spacebar for just about anything (if Brent Simmons were Microsoft, he’d have a U.S. Patent on this by now). Furthermore, it claims to sync itself up between different computers (haven’t tried that) and since it’s Java it ought to work about the same on different kinds of computers (what a concept, eh?), so I can see something like this being a real attractive package for some people. Here’s a screenshot.
One gripe; it’s slooooooooooow; the UI is nice and responsive, but scanning my 130-odd feeds is an order of magnitude slower than NetNewsWire. These days, things like NetBeans and LimeWire have proven that there’s no good excuse for shipping a slow Java app.
