Kontact: Feeds (Akregator)

Sorry it took me a little bit more, but there's a literature contest, and is my biggest priority right now, and it's very time consuming.

Welcome to another issue of the Kontact series, this week we will give a look to Feeds part of Kontact, I used to use this application on KDE 3.5, and it seems like it didn't change much, but, don't misunderstand me, this isn't a bad thing, since Akregator probably have on of the simplest, powerful and easy to use interfaces all around KDE. Let's go on ;-)

Akregator

By default it looks like this:


Even, if the toolbar has many icons, the only one that can be removed (in it's current state) is the "What's this?" Icon. The browser part is useful when you're looking at the whole story, however, I'm not sure how much the user will actually browse using tabs inside Akregator. In fact, the best would be a dynamic toolbar, when you're at the main interface, they should dissapear, and when you're looking at a full story, they should appear (but it would be good if merged stop and reload), yet, the interface looks well (and not cluttered) anyway.

Akregator supports different view modes, all of them are quite good actually, with their strong point and minor weak points :-) On all views there's a little flaw, they show the feed source on the feed list, this is unnecessary, since you're looking at the feed source at the side bar ;-).

So I removed it for all the following screenshots but many seem confused, getting rid of it while viewing individual feeds, won't change the layout while looking at multiple feeds (all feeds or folders):


Normal View: The feed viewer is on the bottom while the feeds list is at the top. The flaw with this arrange, is that if the feed is a little bit long, you'll have to scroll a lot to look at the actual feed:

Widescreen view: This one gets pretty cluttered easily, however, if you plan on using the application maximized, it will be definitively the best view (however, I think that any interface that needs many space to work is flawed, and the kontact window default size is my reference):


Combined view: Will give the biggest space to look at the actual feed, however, you lose the list of the feeds, meaning more scrolling to actually know what's new and might interest you.


I personally believe the normal is the best one overall, and it's a pretty good default :-)

As I said in the first article, Kontact is a suite made of different application all combined by using KParts, this is great, and can be used by any application, Akregator makes a pretty good use of them. How's this? When you click to read the whole story, it will open inside Kontact, on a tab. This is great, of course, if you want to, you can open it on the browser too:


Disclaimer: I couldn't care less of a cat spinning... I just wanted a feed with youtube video.

Adding new feeds is very easy, you just click "Add new feed" and you're done:
Then you get a small dialog for tweaking the name of the feed, and other little things (like intervals), it's extremely well done, clean and easy. Kudos to the developers, Akregator interface is sooooo well done:


You can arrange them on folders:


Once again, search works as expected:

You can narrow your results easily:


The configuration dialogues are very clean and straight forward (self-explanatory), take a look:


Well, this is for today, I hope you like it, as you saw Akgregator is very nice, easy, uncluttered and functional.

Coming up next: Kontact: Journal*
Stay Tuned

*Unless somebody tells me about a good free usenet service, since I won't pay for something I find mostly useless (I apologize in advance to the usenet users), if you know about about one, please mail or leave comment here :-)