February 08, 2008
Sync Problem With NetNewsWire, FeedDemon & NewsGator
That’s it. I give up. I have tried to understand the way NewsGator syncs its products and get it to work for me. In the process I’ve lost over 6,000 feed items and many hours attempting to retrieve them. Was it too good to be true? All I wanted was a reliable system to sync feeds on different computers across platforms. The applications themselves are fine—it’s just the feed synchronisation I ran into trouble with.
Hard To Synchronize
Is it so hard to sync feeds across computers? One should think not. I found NewsGator’s online version plain ridiculous. Just like Snappy the Clam back in July 2007, I could not get this to work: my attempts at deleting a folder were unsuccessful, despite the fact that I tried six different browsers on two different platforms.
My NetNewsWire install (v3.1.1; the latest version) started throwing non-stop newsgator syncing errors. These were temporarily resolved by deleting the Web Cache.
On top of everything else, it appears there are inconsistencies in the way NewsGators’ applications sync: NetNewsWire sends the status of feeds before it downloads them while FeedDemon appears to be doing exactly the opposite. This is how I lost my 6,000+ feed items.
Beta Bait
It looks like NewsGator has released a half baked product on the market. It’s disappointing stuff: if you can’t fully support a product, please don’t release it—I’d rather not bite the beta bait. If you want to run public beta programs, please do like Opera and many others: release beta previews to whoever is daring & patient enough to help debug it. Thoroughly test the product before releasing it to the public as final, and when you do beat your drum, make sure it works the way you advertise it.
Bye NetNewsWire, Welcome Back Vienna
I’ll go back to my old system now. Two computers. Two different feed streams: one for work related feeds, the other for all else.
I will keep using FeedDemon (just like TopStyle, it’s a great Nick Bradbury application). But until others are reporting positive results after biting the beta bait, I’ll dump NetNewsWire and go back to using Vienna.