Random Eyes

PulpFiction was recently reviewed by Ars Technica in a review discussing several Mac-only RSS news readers and was awarded an 8/10 rating.

I think Erik’s comments about the review are worth a read. It really is amazing how many people don’t quite get the point as to Pulpfiction’s focus. It’s not about trying to turn RSS reading into Email reading. Rather, the idea is to pay attention to content and subject matter and treat things on a fine-grained per article level instead of the more coarse per feed level.

To really do this effectively, you do have to set up some filters, and that takes a little bit of work, but once you’re done the news reading experience is so much better! It makes sense to put things into folders based on the topics at hand. A lot of feed cover a wide range of topics, but for me it makes a lot of sense to put reviews in one folder, tips and hints in another, political rants in yet another. To this end, one of the quotes in the review made me laugh because it’s obvious this guy hasn’t really done more than scratch the surface with PulpFiction:

News is a constant river of information. Damming that river at your inbox creates an enormous reservoir of information you have to address. Even just a few newsfeeds will accumulate a lot of information over a weekend.

Guess what? My river isn’t “dammed at my inbox” at all! In fact, I have so many filters set up that it’s really, really rare for anything to ever appear in my inbox at all! Instead, it all ends up in folders sorted by subject matter in a way that feels “right” to me. Better yet, I can set up filters with multiple actions that can do some really slick things. Like using Growl to alert me the moment a new comment appears on the comments feed for this blog and then filing the article in a specific folder, for example. (If only Wordpress had an authenticated feed that would allow me to see articles in queue for moderation…)

You can have filters flag important articles and mark others as read. If you make a habit of flagging stuff you want to keep and then set the preference to automatically delete old articles marked as read, the stuff that you don’t have time to read and don’t care too much about will eventually just go away by itself! (Sometimes you might even want a filter that just outright deletes some stuff, too, and you can do that also.)

Once I finish setting up an “official” development blog for Freshly Squeezed Software / illumineX, I’ll have to post some entries showing interesting examples of ways to use PulpFiction’s extensive filter support.

Oh, and to just complete the thought on granularity, I almost never use the “Feeds” pane, either, because to me the source of an article is much less interesting to me than its content. So I use the “Folders” pane almost exclusively except for the times when I’m testing things to make sure they work right. Once you make the mental leap from “I need to manage my feeds” to “I need to manage my news articles”, or in other words “content is king”, then I find PulpFiction is a great way to work.

Anyway, I’m glad that PulpFiction did earn an 8/10. I think that’s especially good when you consider that the reviewer apparently spent some time talking with the developer of the only other news reader to earn a higher score, but never contacted us at all. Even without that extra “help”, PulpFiction (much to the credit of Erik and all the other people listed in the Info panel) still managed to make a really good showing.

I have to admit that the apparent coziness between the reviewer and a developer of one of the other products does raise some red flags about impartiality and reviewer bias in my mind, but I’m still happy to accept the nice things he had to say and will definitely take his criticisms into consideration as I work on future releases. Maybe next time around we’ll be able to score even better, even if the reviewer is still cuddling up to someone else. At any rate, I’ve got a long list of improvements I hope to make over the next year!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Work, Mac OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.