.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Quick News brings your RSS feeds to your Palm
.AUTHOR Heather Wardell
.SUMMARY Heather Wardell recently discovered the joys of using a RSS reader program to consolidate all her favorite blogs, and wondered if she could somehow get the same features on her Palm. Stand Alone, Inc’s Quick News promised, but did it deliver? In terms of base functionality, yes. Its advanced features, though, need more work.
.OTHER
I recently discovered the joys of using a RSS reader program to consolidate all my favorite blogs, and wondered if I could somehow get the same features on my Palm. Stand Alone, Inc’s Quick News promised, but did it deliver? In terms of base functionality, yes. Its advanced features, though, need more work.
.H1 Installation and first use
Once the software is installed, you need to choose news feeds. The program comes with a set of default feeds, which you can keep or delete. As I wanted to focus on my favorite writing blogs, I chose to delete the defaults and instead added about ten of my favorite feeds.
Adding a feed directly is straightforward, but slow. Essentially, you need to know the feed’s Internet address, and you enter it into the program. Figure A shows the "Add Feed" screen with the feed for my blog in the process of being added.
.FIGPAIR A The "Add Feed" screen, like the other screens in Quick News, is clear and easy to understand.
If you have been using a desktop feed reader and want to transfer all of your feeds to Quick News, you can export your feeds to an OPML file and have Quick News import it. I did this, following the directions in the user manual, and it worked perfectly.
.TEASER Is Quick News all it can be? Read the rest of our brutally honest PDA review.
.H1 Reading and processing posts
Quick News’ screens are well-designed and easy to use. Figure B shows a recent blog post of mine. The shortcut buttons at the top that let you quickly do things like search a feed and change the text size.
.FIGPAIR B Quick News displays blog posts and news neatly and efficiently.
Most of my blogs worked perfectly with Quick News. I have noticed that any post that uses the HTML coding for lists (both lists with numbers and those with bullets) doesn’t work properly in Quick News. This leads to posts that read, "Here are the eight ways to make your life perfect. I hope you enjoyed this list," with the list information simply not shown at all between the two sentences.
Quick News offers a flag article feature, which I’ve used in part to handle this situation. If a post appears to have list information I haven’t seen and I really want to see it, I flag the article so I’ll remember to look at it on my laptop later. You can also have Quick News open an article in the Palm’s browser, but I find most blogs display so poorly in the browser that it’s not worth the effort.
Along with news, Quick News can handle podcasts. I have tested this out, and it does work, but it’s not something I would do regularly, as the download time for a five-minute MP3 file is approximately two minutes via my Palm’s Internet connection. However, it’s nice to have the option. Unfortunately, the podcast manager built in to Quick News, which is supposed to allow you to delete podcasts, did not delete the files when I pressed the delete button, so I had to delete the old podcasts manually outside Quick News.
Once blogs and news are on your handheld, Quick News does a great job of displaying them, letting you mark them as read or unread, and removing them according to your settings. The process of getting them onto the handheld, though, isn’t as solid.
.H1 HotSync conduit, Internet connection, and automatic updates
The HotSync conduit works well, for the most part. It’s slow, but it does the job. Occasionally one of my feeds does not get updated, reporting an error, but the next HotSync always gets the feed so I’m assuming a temporary glitch or a busy site is causing the trouble, or possibly a waver in my laptop’s wireless Internet connection.
However, this conduit is the first one I’ve seen in my over ten years of Palm use that does not have the "set as default" check box. With that check box in place, you can set a conduit not to do anything at a given HotSync and know it will return to its pre-set default status on the next one. Instead, the Quick News conduit requires you to remember you’ve disabled it and go back in to re-enable it after the HotSync is complete. I wish Stand Alone had followed the convention here, as I often turn off various conduits to speed up my synchronization and was constantly forgetting to turn Quick News back on.
When I added my feeds on my first use of the program, I told Quick News to update all of them via the Internet connection (which it calls "local update", which confused me for a while). It opened the Internet connection, which I keep turned off by default to conserve battery power, and set to work. Two minutes into the process, the Palm turned off, as per my power off setting. I turned it back on to make sure it was still working, which it was, then left it alone for as long as I thought it would take.
When I pressed the power button, though, it refused to turn on. Concerned, I tried several more times, left it alone for a few minutes, tried again, and then it worked. I saw this again and again during my testing, and it appears that if the Palm is off during the final updating stage, the stage where the software is importing data, it cannot be powered on until the process is complete. Now that I know this, I don’t worry about it, but I do think it’s unfortunate that it responds this way.
Sometimes the updating process starts the Internet connection, updates only one blog, and then quits. While there is a feature to allow you to update only one, this happens to me as well when I ask to have all blogs updated, but not with any pattern I could discern.
Quick News provides automatic update features, via the Internet, to keep your blogs and news feeds refreshed. According to the manual, there is a spot in each feed’s settings to state how frequently the feed should be updated. Despite the screen shot in the manual showing this setting, it does not exist. There is a global automated update setting, but I found the Palm didn’t always launch an update when I expected it to do so. For example, I set it to run every two hours beginning at eight o’clock; it ran at eight and then said its next update would be at noon.
More seriously, the software launches the update without giving you a chance to skip it, and in my tests the Cancel button often didn’t work. Some of my other programs which run automatic updates either run in the background or pop up a message counting down to the update, so I can cancel if I don’t want my Palm tied up.
.H1 Conclusion
I think Quick News has the potential to be outstanding, but it is currently not living up to that potential. While the base features are solid, the HotSync and updating issues make the program difficult to use. Other little quirks, such as every help button in the application bringing up a blank screen, make Quick News feel unfinished.
If the connectivity issues were fixed, I would rate Quick News a solid 4. As it stands now, its rating is 2.
.RATING 2
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Learn more about [[http://standalone.com/palmos/quick_news/|Quick News]].
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
