NewsFire flaws

Permalink

I recently switched over to NewsFire as my feed reader, after becoming increasingly annoyed with the performance problems and ‘open source feel’ of Vienna. While the experience has been largely positive, there are a number of bugs and annoying aspects that I wish to document.

Visual

• Mandatory colour bubbles on groups: I dislike colour bubbles. I never use them in the Finder and rarely them in Transmission. Presumably the idea is to help reduce visual clutter for some people, but I am not in this population. Please make it optional.
• Fade-in on launch, fade-out on quit: Completely unnecessary.
• Hover colour in headline view: Somehow I never get lost in iTunes.
• ‘New’ badge: The contrast difference between read and unread is sufficient.
• Greyed group title bar: I’m really not sure what the deal is here. It’s good to grey when the application’s not in use, but doing it when the pane’s not active?

Bugs/design flaws

• Visual glitches: Not entirely uncommon.
• OPML: There are two major problems here. First, there’s not clear how to ‘select’ feeds when I’m presented with the import box. Something like a checkbox would make the process clearer. Second, and more infuriatingly, opening an OPML file that contains existing feeds will blank said feeds, even if the import is canceled. Re-importing a large number of feeds can have [drastic results].