Greg In The Desert

A few days ago I wrote about what I thought was a great news reader called Pulp Fiction. When I wrote about that I was using the lite version. A few days later I decided I wanted some of the full version features; primarily: Unlimited customizable labels, Custom cascading stylesheets (CSS), Fast, powerful filters and actions & AppleScript support. These features are all great but it’s missing one important feature: stability!

When I started off I had but a few subscriptions. I now have 52 adding 1 ever few days as I find more and more sites. The more sites I added the slower it got. It now takes about 3 seconds to move (with the arrow keys) from one article to another.

The worse part of the program is the crashing. If I left the program open all day I could expect at least 6 crashes or more. I quickly found that it crashed often, mostly when it was retrieving feeds. Having broadband I figured I would set the number of connections to the max: 25. Setting the connections to 2 or 5 seemed to reduce the number of crashes while getting feeds. It still seems to crash randomly for no apparent reason. Another problem I have when updating feeds is a dialog box telling me of errors with a quit or continue button. Unfortunately the continue button just results in more of the same dialog box, the only option is to quit.

I really wanted to like this program but it has far to many problems. I emailed the developer and they said to watch for version 1.0.1 to fix the problems. No firm date on release but expect it mid to end June.