Worst Aggregator UI, Ever?

Dave added a feature to Radio to use the Start Menu as the UI to a RSS Aggregator. Is it just me, or does this look like an extremely awkward way to view your RSS feeds?

I mean, there are no item descriptions, no indications of what you have seen before, you'll have to traverse the Start Menu all over again for every item you watch, etc. Am I missing something here or is this one of the worst RSS aggregator UIs ever?

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Comments

Luke, You're not missing a thing...that is the worst.
I don't know if you've heard of Syndirella but it works like a champ for any RSS feed. Even has an option for creating your own "web feeds"

Posted by Fil at April 3, 2003 11:50 PM

URL didn't take. (you must be sanitizing that)
http://yole.ru/projects/syndirella/

Posted by Fil at April 3, 2003 11:51 PM

You're not the first one that tried (and failed) to embed html in comments on my weblog - To prevent this from happening again, I just changed my weblog setup to now allow for this.

And yes, I have heard of Syndirella, but am using my own aggregator, which I will soon be posting on this site. It doesn't have Syndirella's screen-scraping feature (yet?), but has some other features you may like...

Posted by Luke Hutteman at April 4, 2003 1:36 AM

Indeed, these seems like a complete cludge of a way to browse RSS feeds.

Posted by Phil Wilson at April 7, 2003 8:54 AM

The start menu is bad enough as an application launcher, let alone an RSS reader.

This is one of those gimmick features that is easy to code (it's just file manipulation, right?), isn't particularly useful, but makes a nice screenshot.

Screenshot-ware isn't a bad thing in itself, though, especially if it's something like this. 99% of users can happily ignore its existence entirely, and the remaining 1% of strange people who find it useful will be happy.

Posted by Charles Miller at April 8, 2003 10:50 PM
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