RSSViewer 3.0

I've tinkered with a little RSS feed aggregation application that I call RSSViewer (not very imaginative, I know) for a while now. I started it as a learning exercise, primarily to learn more about the XML parsing API in java. My original version is documented on my old web site. The latest version is available here. It's pretty simple to install. Just unzip the file to your hard drive, navigate to the RSSViewer folder wherever you extracted it to, and then run the RSSViewer.jar file found there (from Windows Explorer, just double click the jar file; from a command line, run java -jar RSSViewer.jar).

The UI hasn't changed much from the earlier version.



What has changed (apart from finally learning how to easily launch the app without a script) includes:

• Changeable look and feel. The Edit->Preferences->Look&Feel menu has a choice of several different look and feel settings that I've found from other open source applications. The screenshot above uses the JGoodies Plastic 3D look & feel.
  
• On some common systems, the application can open pages in the system default web browser. This works on Windows and should work on Linux as well (I haven't tested that). I'm using the Java desktop package to do this, and it has implementations for Windows, Linux, and Sun OS. Choose Edit->Preferences->Browser->External to enable this, assuming you are on a supported system. Otherwise you can bring the page up in a terribly crude internal browser page, which is just a JTextPane. Not the preferred approach, but will work everywhere.

The application requires Java 1.5 or later. I've run it on both 1.5 and 1.6. The newer platform seems a bit better, but that has nothing to do with this application.

As before, I'm sure there are lots of areas for improvement. I don't claim the thing to be a top of the line application. But, hey, it's free.