14 DAY TRIAL // Keeping updated with the goings on all over the world. "Information is power" a wise man once said. This is true in the era in which we are living. At the speed information travels today, the need for new tools to retrieve it from the Internet is evident. That is why RSS aggregators have been created. You can easily subscribe to RSS feeds and it won't even cost you a dime.
The category of RSS readers is over saturated with such tools offering a myriad of options many users don't even need. Some RSS aggregators have a pretty fat price on the price tag while others are free to use with no strings attached. A good such information retrieval tool would work fine and won't pose any problems like complicated configuration.
Reading the features present in Abilon, it seems a very versatile application designed to get your news, read them in the built-in web browser and publish them on your personal blog. The set of features included in Abilon makes it a strong candidate to becoming your favorite and it can even compete even with the more costing similar applications.
Immediately after the installation process is complete, the first thing you have to do is select the feed groups you want to be informed for from the defaults available (covers everything from Entertainment, Health and Science News to Software News, Weblogs and General News).
The interface is split into four separate sections. Feed Tree lists all the feeds. They are located in the folder categories and can be updated regularly in automatic mode or manually by selecting All Feeds and using the F5 shortcut key.
Feeds window will display the actually feeds containing all the news. For listing more feeds, the news are presented in snippet form and once you click on one of them, it will be shown in the third window on the right.
The last of the four windows is Memories. The purpose of this feature is to store and organize the data you want to keep for further reference. It functions like a bookmark in the web browser. This way, the news will not be lost and the user can reread the information later. The feeds will also be at hand and you won't have to look for them too long.
Related to this feature is the archiving function Abilon provides. The software reads the XML file containing the RSS feed supplied by the author. The author in turn will constantly modify the XML file and out of date feeds will be deleted to make room for the new ones. What Abilon does is archive the old news instead of deleting it so that you will still have access to it.
Adding new RSS feeds is possible as well as the website supports RSS subscribing. Also, the default categories' names can be changed with a single click of your mouse.
Setting up Abilon is a snap and the entire configuration can be done in seconds. The eight options available cover absolutely everything from interface to mail notification. To avoid starting Abilon every time Windows starts, the software makes available enabling automatic launch at startup and minimize on start. Also, if you do not want to use the internal web browser supplied by the program (works fine, but it will not provide you all the options a regular web browser would) you can set the news to be launched in the default web browser.
Also, audio alerting is possible, this way, if your visual is not too sharp, a sound can be played to alert you about the update of the feeds. The downside is that the sounds are not configurable but I can assure you that the audio alerting is not unpleasant at all.
The feeds in the tree can be ordered alphabetically and Abilon is capable of displaying the unread items first. The font of the items is also configurable and for each pane, you can have a different font and size of the letters.
Checking of the feeds is one of the most important options available in a RSS reader. Not being able to update the feeds at a user defined time interval results in a major drawback. It is not the case with Abilon which provides three options concerning this matter. The automatic update can be either custom (the user defines the hour, minute and second interval Abilon should check for updates of the feeds) or at a minimum interval of 10 minutes (Check Every option). The manual check allows the update to be done by the user whenever s/he considers.
Blogging Tool is the only flaw Abilon has. The drawback is that the only blog services supported are "Blogger", "LiveJournal" and "Movable Type".
Notifications can also be received via e-mail and the appropriate settings can be done in the Program Settings window, under Mail. All you have to do is provide the outgoing SMTP server and your email. The feature comes in handy if you want to be notified this way or if you want to inform some other person about the news from a certain website.
The Good
Very versatile and easy to use. Among the top features that stand out there are Memories, Blogger and OPML exporting/importing functions. This way, you can save your feeds and import them into some other aggregator or import them from a different RSS reader.
The Bad
Besides the rather limited blog services, the mail function refuses to work in my case. Also, a little more color to the interface would make the application more appealing.
The Truth
Despite all the baddies, Abilon succeeds in updating the feeds and the interface allows the user to easily view all the feeds. The built-in web browser, although it will only display the feeds you select, lets you view the entire news on the author's website.
The application is free and works like a charm.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
