In a previous post, I mentioned my decision to drop Gush as my news reader and IM client. Today, Wes Carr, co-founder of 2Entwine, emailed me:
"(...) You mentioned that you did not like how Gush manages your feeds. We would love to hear your comments on that if you could be more specific. Unfortunately Gush does demand a good bit of processing power, but we can't blame you for that :) As for file sharing, it's scheduled for our next release. (...) we greatly appreciate any feedback you have to give."
Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned file sharing as a reason to drop Gush - at beast I would've dropped Gush as an IM client for it but not as a news reader. I'm pleased that file sharing will be supported in the next release. The 'response times' are also not critical - they can be somewhat frustrating tough. I wouldn't be too quick to blame on a slow/overburdened CPU either - given on the fact that I used gush on a dual 2.4GHz Xeon box and now use it (well, not anymore) on a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 (both with 1GB of memory - so that's not an issue). I mean, Doom 3 and Far Cry don't complain (much) why should Gush? I think it could probably be better optimized, at least make it seem more responsive even if under the hood it's actually being slower ( I believe Machine Learning will shine in the future doing this kind of stuff - more on this in another, dedicated post). What made me stop using Gush is more complicated. I said "I don't like the way it manages read/unread feeds". I obviously need to elaborate if I want anyone else to understand.
Let's that a look at my news reading habits. I subscribed to a huge amount of feeds: blogs (most of which are linked to in my blogroll), tech news sites (such as slashdot), Computer Security sites (such as SecurityFocus), hardware sites (such as engadget) and many sites from many other categories. Unfortunately, the time I dedicate to reading them is very limited. What this means is that on any given day I won't be able to read every single post I get on my news reader. I will often read only the ones with the most interesting titles. On weekends however, I have more free time and I often read some posts from certain preferred feeds that I didn't have time to read during the week. There are also certain feeds I always read whenever they have a new post (such as Relax's Presence and The Tao of Mac). Since I'm going 'back to school' soon (in 8 days) and therefore the amount of free time I have will decrease significantly, I predict that searching my feeds for specific words will become far more relevant.
Now, let's get back to Gush. Whenever you have new items on a given feed, the number of new items is shown next to the name of the feed. Most news readers do this; it's a way to know what you have and what you haven't read. They also (usually) make unread items bold. Unfortunately, the way gush is designed means that you read a feed not an item. This means that even if you've read only one post on my blog and you had a total of 4 unread posts, Gush will assume that you've read them all and the other 3 won’t be marked in any special way to show that they weren’t read. Thus, I'm unable to easily keep track of which posts I've read in feeds that I didn’t read completely. Gush also lacks 'filtering' capabilities (like those of SharpReader). And so far Gush has lacked the ability to search for content on online feeds (feeds which you're not subscribed to) through sites like feedster. This is however about to change and gush will soon become know for its search capabilities. And an easy way to import/export feeds like FeedDemon has would also be nice. In fact importing/exporting feeds in Gush is not easy at all. The only way I know to get the OPML out of it is to copy it from C:\Documents and Settings\rei\Application Data\Gush\Profiles\solidparadox@2entwine.net\RSS\subscriptions.opml (for me).
Another thing that is missing in Gush is the ability to flag an item. I flag the posts I want to blog about later.
The sad thing is that in spite of all this, Gush is so damn sexy that I'm tempted to use it! It is definitively a lesson in UI design.
So, what would my ideal news reader look like? It would have 3 panes (like MS Outlook 2003). The leftmost pane would be the Categories pane, the Feed pane in the middle and the Items pane on the right. It would be able to search downloaded feeds as well as searching online with the help of various services. Blogging from it sounds nice. And flags would make their appearance. I’m going to learn python (I’ll blog about it latter) and it might make a good first project.
Conclusion: Gush is a fantastic news reader but, at this moment, it’s not for everyone… well, at least not for me. I started this post convinced that I wasn’t going to use Gush again any time soon, now I’m trying to make excuses to use it again: “maybe I can use just for my favorite feeds, the ones I always fully read”. Regardless, I’m sure to keep an eye on it; I believe it will be greatly improved in future versions and will continue to innovate.
