First, BlogBridge is a great app. It works very well, and fits into my RSS workflow better than anything else I've ever used. I can totally see myself using this app for a long, long time. With that in mind, here are some ideas for making it even better...
- Better MacOSX integration?
- run as normal app with menubar in system's, and app icon, etc... (as opposed to a generic java app)
- accept feeds passed by other apps (safari's RSS icon now spawns a fresh copy of BlogBridge, and then does nothing with the result)
- Perhaps show a different dock icon when there are pending new items to read? Don't have to show the count, just a flag to say "hey! there's new stuff!"
- Insane amounts of RAM (real and virtual) are being used on MacOSX.
- When viewing a link in the browser, it should (optionally?) open the link in the background, rather than bringing the browser to the front.
- No search field?
- creating a "SmartFeed" for a simple search isn't ideal
- Article Cache
- no option to save items for 30 days or 6 months or forever. Only an "Articles remaining after purge" setting. What does that mean?
- Image feeds
- if I have a SmartFeed that pulls items from other Image Feeds (Flickr subscriptions), the items show in linear chronological view, even if all feeds are set to be "Image" feeds. There's no way to set that for the SmartFeed itself.
- If I have a feed that I manually set to be an "Image feed" by setting that flag on the subscription, the images are dimmed out unless the mouse is over the image. That doesn't happen if I create a new SmartFeed for a Flickr tag. Inconsistent behaviour.
- If I set a feed to be an "Image feed", if I click on the image, nothing appears to happen. I have to right-click and select "open link in browser" (say, if I want to mark a Flickr image as a Favorite, or comment, etc...)
- Smart Feeds
- I set a SmartFeed to use the parameters: "Feed Tag contains 'Flickr'" and "Status is 'Unread'", thinking I'd get a handy SmartFeed for all unviewed Flickr images. But it didn't find anything. I changed the first parameter to "Feed title contains 'Photo'", and it works fine. Hmm...
And then there's the "synchronization" feature - where it syncs your settings with a server using an XML-RPC api. Very cool feature. But it hasn't worked for me yet. Each time, it gives me a "communication error" message. Doh. Then, there's the dialog that controls synchronizations:
The "more..." button displays an offset menu of options: "Only Load" and "Only Save" - but the status shows values for "Last Sync In" and "Last Sync Out" - is loading in? out? Is saving going to the server, or saving from it? Also, only one l in successful ;-)