By Heather Wardell
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.
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.
FIGURE A
The "Add Feed" screen, like the other screens in Quick News, is clear and easy to understand. (click for larger image)
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.
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.
FIGURE B
Quick News displays blog posts and news neatly and efficiently. (click for larger image)
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.
