14 DAY TRIAL // The Internet is all about news and being the first who finds out about each hot subject around, no matter if it's about politics, IT, sex or astrology, but if you get to check the news sites too late, that's not good. Anyway, the problem is that I still have to find a news reader to suit my needs and make me start using it, because I have already found some interesting programs from this family, but I didn't get to use one on a regular basis yet.
Today's find is called YeahReader, its latest version is 2.0.197 and comes free of any charge. Its installation kit is 2.1MB in size and as easy to setup as using the program...so, let's find out more about the looks and features of this small and useful news reading application!
YeahReader has a simple interface, well organized and very easy to use, but your eyes won't hurt when looking at it, because it looks good too! There's nothing out of ordinary here, because you get a menu bar, a toolbar and three panels - feeds, news titles and an internal news viewer. These being said, I guess we should find out more about them, so let's see...
The program is already installed, and I run it for the first time. Once started, all the news available are here in a flash. What news? The program has already five news folders and a couple of sources available, so this is the source. Of course that you can add any of your own sources, since YeahReader supports podcasts, RSS, RDF and Atom formats.
A weak point that I discover now is that this application doesn't have a news finding tool. You can search through the news you have already retrieved, but you can't seek new sources. Anyway, this issue is partially solved by two of the online tools available - RSS feed directory and Search in Google (they are links to Internet locations that can help you a lot when in need of news sources).
Adding feeds and folders is very easy to do, just use the toolbar tools or the items from the File menu. This is not what I will tell you about next, because there are more interesting things to check now - the available tools.
First of all, feeds can be exported to your collection, if you are a news freak or just a news collector. The file formats available for these operations are CSV, TXT, JavaScript or RSS 2.0 XML. Next, import and export of OPML files is also supported, but that's not unusual. What surprised me the most is the built- in blog client. This handy tool lets you write messages and post them on your LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress or Delicious blog. Is this cool or what?
To all the above, you can add support for an external text to speech engine, proxy support, automatic feed updates and even more. All this, for free! Let's check the conclusions now, shall we?
The Good
YeahReader is a basic news reader that surprised me with its excellent blog client, but there's more to it than just that. Its interface is well done, easy to use and customizable; the integrated viewer does its job well, and all these come for free.
The Bad
The Help file of the program is unfinished, and there's no internal feed finder. Probably advanced users will find some other drawbacks, but this is all I was able to find from a beginner's point of view.
The Truth
Should I?...or maybe not! If I get the time to start my own blog one day, this program can be an excellent helper. For my news retrieval needs, it could also be a worthy choice, but not yet. For the rest of you, I can only say one thing: get YeahReader while it's free!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
