RSS Bot - News Notifier App Reviews

I was looking for a lightweight, non-intrusive app that would show me all of my news in one spot. This app does that almost perfectly. It allows you to quickly see the titles of news articles and categorizes them, also allowing you to select groups as read. Clicking on a link allows you to open the article in a new tab. There are only little nagging issues, but the majority of them are due to glitchy/poorly implemented RSS feeds (repeated stories on Google).

Try to import my OPML and it just hung. Prior to that, no posts showed. Why would I want to drag through a long menu of items, picking one at a time anyway? Bad Design. Deleted from my system… :(

Works great. Easy feed add. Everything shows up in Notifications.

When I first installed it a few weeks ago all was well. but as of the last week it just keeps crashing. No updates have been done or configuration changes to my system.

What is it, a plug in for Safari? I installed it but its asking me to import something, dont know where to put it, still cant read any RSS feeds.

Its simple and integrates well with Mountain Lion. Its easy to use and set up and makes getting news feeds brainless.

I tried adding several mainstream news feeds and it didnt accept a single one, not even the ones shown on the preview examples. I dont know if thats because I chose not to sync first with a social media account, or if its just not working. Will be deleting it.

Im not exactly sure how this app got such high ratings. I hooked it up to an RSS feed and every few minutes it harasses me like a jilted ex-lover with false messages that new RSS feed items are in the feed. So far, of the 10 REAL articles that are actually in the feed, this app has managed to dummy up just under 500 duplicates of the same 10 articles. Not very helpful.

You need to fix this.. Last update screwed something up! I really like this app but it does not seem to mark items as read.. it marks them in its own app but not online… If I use a my other reeder app they are not marked as read. Its still a Great app!

Frustrating. I get the same articles over and over, in spite of marking all are read. The wheel is constantly spinning as it updates or quits, making it difficult to do anything quickly. Rarely, goes through all my RSS feeds. Google Reader is sorely missed as is the use of my previous Reeder app.

While I only subscribe to a small amount of feeds, I have not had any of the story repitition issues described in other comments. Perhaps the issue is with the feed source editing/updating a story? If so, I would think the app could be updated with a preference on how to manage that.

App worked great until latest update. Now it spits out fake and duplicate entries for some reason. One of my feeds apprently published over 3000 articles in a day according to RSS Bot. Uninstalled until this issue is fixed

Would be nice if I could organize my feed. As it stands right now theres none, and it would be convenient if I could at least organize it alphabetically as it is on the Feeds screen.

Well, Im glad the repition prolem was finally fixed. However, the app lags so much. Almost every time I click the symbol to read any headlines, it lags for a few seconds before the menu finally scroll down. Its frustrating if youre trying to read through all your articles.

I was looking for a simple way to view feeds and this works great. Keep up the good work!

I liked this app until v1.5. It had its quirks but v1.5 completely disabled it. When it first runs it announces that there are new items available. When I click on the icon there are no items listed and all the menu items are grayed out. Im giving it one star for now and ill update it when the developer fixes the problem.

Even after doing the updates, this app crashes. Very disappointed, it worked for about 1 week, but the news I follow seems to overload it. Removing this and looking for something else.

The RSS Bot resides on the menu bar. After you add some content to follow, it organizes a list of titles that is easy to scan to decide if a topic is worth reading. When a topic is clicked it opens on the desktop and disappears from the RSS Bot menu. If nothing appeals, you can mark all topics as read and the list disappears. Its very intuitive and easy to learn. If you want to read something later, you can save an article to the "reading list" in Safari. When new content arrives, it gives you a brief system notification when setup in Preferences. You can also assign a notification sound. I have been using it for over a week and it works without glitches and stays out of the way of other software on your desktop. I can recommend it with no reservations.

This application keeps me updated with my RSS feeds. However, it does NOT display more than six headlines in the right panel. So, if you have many feeds and don’t sit at your computer 24 hours a day, you’ll have to click its icon at the top right-hand corner of your screen to get ALL of the news. I prefer clicking the right panel open and getting the first line or two in the story over clicking the icon and getting ONLY the headline before clicking on the story. That being said, I have not deleted this program because, it integrates VERY well into the OS. And, it’s icon looks just like the RSS feed icon you see all over the internet. Plus, it doesn’t seem to have effected the boot up time.

Nice, lightweight, easy to use and set up. Decent and very easy to use filtering. My only complaint is that it lacks control over individual feeds. The addition of notify based on filter (not the whole feed), configurable update interval and mark as read after interval (for individual feeds) would make this an outstanding app.