14 DAY TRIAL // Information and time are the two things that one can't live without these days. Money and all the others are nothing, because if you don't have time and access to the latest news, you won't have them either. Unfortunately, you can't make the day longer or turn back time, but you can try to use it as efficient as possible. There are some software tools that can help you organize yourselves, but today it's not their time...
The postal service seems to have some problems with me, because wherever I moved, I had serious problems receiving mail or intact packages. It seems that the only thing remaining now is to change the country I live in, but that's an issue on hold at this time, and probably will stay that way for a really long time. Fortunately, my Internet connection works much better, and nothing can stop me from using a free news reader, apart from that program's reliability issues or severe lack of features, of course. Today's news reading application is called RSS Captor, and its latest version is 3.09. No worries about the price, because the only thing you'll have to spend on this application is your time, but things work just fine with that, since you spend some, but you earn more... or at least that's how things should work, as far as I know. The program's setup package weighs only 883KB, and the installation process is as easy as possible, so we can leave this part behind and move on to the interface and features, as always. Are you ready?
Latest news are important, but a good design of a newspaper can increase the number of its readers, and the same applies to the software able to deliver you the latest news. This time things look just fine, because RSS Captor's interface is well organized and easy to use, despite the fact that this program is a little more than just an ordinary news reader. The main window contains the following interface elements: the main menu, the commands panel(you can call it "toolbar", if you want, because that wouldn't be far from the truth), five tabs corresponding to the main tools you are going to use - Feeds, Watches, Newsbins, Search and Links, the work area and the status bar.
When using a news reader, first thing that you should do is subscribe to new feeds, but as most such programs, RSS Captor comes with a fair amount of built-in news sources. If you want more, nothing easier - you can import data from RSS files or add new feeds manually. I was somehow disappointed to notice the absence of a feed search tool that would find me the news sources on the Internet and then let me add them to the program, but there are other interesting features that should compensate for that...
The refresh time of a feed can be set manually starting with 5 minutes and going up to a 4 week period. You can easily manage your feeds using groups, newsbins and watches. The Search feature can use regular expressions and this can prove an excellent time saver for people working with large amounts of data.
The news reader that I am going to use as my favorite (I still don't have one, if you are wondering about it...) must have an internal Web browser. In the worst case scenario, when that program will have so many outstanding features and miss exactly this one, I may go with it opening the default browser from my system for a while, spamming the producer to add what I want all that time. Unfortunately, RSS Captor doesn't have an internal browser. Even worse, it claims that I should have Firefox installed to open the pages. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Firefox, I like it very much and, even more, I had it installed already, and recently, I made it the default browser. Well, RSS Captor still says that I have to get Firefox...
At last, I should say that the Links area has the same small problem...it doesn't work, and the documentation wasn't able to clear things out for me. The Preferences area has fewer options available than I expected, but things are OK - proxy server settings, sound alerts, date and time conversion, as well as a couple of useful General settings.
These being said, the time has come to check the conclusions and the screenshots, don't you think? Let's go!
The Good
RSS Captor is an interesting news reader that's fast, has a well organized, customizable interface and is easy to use.
The Bad
The lack of an internal browser and the fact that it doesn't recognize Firefox 2, are two big black balls that I have to throw into the pot, but I hope that time will solve these issues.
The Truth
News for free? Yes, of course, please! RSS Captor may not be the best free solution for having latest news delivered to your computer, but it's worth a try, for sure!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
