Misleading Information in Article "The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators" [LWN.net]

From:		Benjamin Pasero <benjamin.pasero-AT-web.de>
To:		lwn-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		Misleading Information in Article "The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators"
Date:		Fri, 31 Mar 2006 08:43:08 +0200

Hello,

I am the author of RSSOwl, which was covered in the article:

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators
(http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/176028/1121c3a959871033/)

Reading the article it seems that the editor did not test RSSOwl
very well. Since the article is criticising the application,
I would have expected a carefully inquest. Maybe the editor is
new to writing articles? I am not sure. Anyways, here is the
problems I found:

- "...but it is not possible to mix articles from multiple feeds..."
  This is not true. You can select "Aggregate Favorites" from the
  contextual menu of a Category to mix all Feeds included into a
  single view.

- "...Opening a feed requires a double-click..."
  This can easily be changed in Preferences. The "Open Mode" allows
  to switch between Single- and Doubleclick. Its really easy to spot,
  since its the first page of preferences. I doubt the editor even
  had a look to preferences

Regarding Performance: The editor should try how fast Eclipse is running
and compare that with RSSOwl. It would be interesting to know if both
run slow, then its most likely a problem of an old GCJ version. Both
applications share the same GUI-library. The GTK version would be
interesting
as well.

Best regards,
Ben

Misleading Information in Article "The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators"

Posted Apr 8, 2006 10:05 UTC (Sat) by erwbgy (subscriber, #4104) [Link] (1 responses)

Reading the article it seems that the editor did not test RSSOwl very well. Since the article is criticising the application, I would have expected a carefully inquest. Maybe the editor is new to writing articles? I am not sure.

Our editor has been writing articles on this site for more than eight years. He is not new to the job, which you could have found out quite easily if you had bothered to look.

The Grumpy Editor articles look at a group of applications that can be used to perform a particular function. They are not an in depth look at any particular application, just experience using the available tools. Sure there are sometimes mistakes, but that rarely detracts from the main points made.

Take the review as constructive criticism. If Jon couldn't find out how to do something in the time he took to review your application then it is likely that many of your users would have the same experience.

I think you have been provided with lots of useful feedback about your application that you can use to make it better.