endo

7 Mar 2006

As soon as I profess my undying love for FeedLounge, Adriaan births an RSS aggregator called endo. What sets endo apart from what I’ve used in the past is the following:

Quicksilver like keyboard interaction – The way it works is that you start typing a RSS feed group name and it automatically moves to that group. Neat.
Smart groups – It’s not new, but it is definitely useful. It looks similiar to what PulpFiction does.
“Smart” downloading – endo includes a helper application called “endoBot” which handles enclosure downloads. It even supports bittorrent!!
Extensibility – (FeedLounge, are you listening?) “There are plugins to create del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati subscriptions. There is also a plugin that can run your own scripts. These scripts can be in AppleScript, Bash, Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby, and should generate feeds.” Adriaan included a nice perl script that gets the latest Boondocks comic.
Growl-like notification – On a per-feed basis, you can configure endo to notify you when a feed is updated. It’s a snazzy looking semi-transparent that pops up briefly and then fades away nicely.
Attention.XML support – This is by far my favoritest feature of endo. Attention.XML allows you to synchronize your feeds to a server. It synchronizes subscription lists, read status, group settings, and subscription settings. You can use your .Mac account for synchronization or use Adriaan’s server for free. This feature has got me on the fence on whether to drop FeedLounge. This is the primary reason why I use web based RSS aggregators over clients like this one. If I can find a way to utilize this feature to it’s fullest, I may have to say farewell to FeedLounge.