RSSOwl is a

news aggregator In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, feed reader, news reader, RSS reader or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates syndicated web content such as online newspapers, blogs, podc ...

for

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

and

Atom Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons. Every solid, liquid, gas, and ...

News feeds. It is written in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

and built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform which uses SWT as a widget toolkit to allow it to fit in with the

look and feel In software design, the look and feel of a graphical user interface comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces (the "look"), as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, boxes ...

of different operating systems while remaining

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software r ...

. Released under the EPL-1.0 license, RSSOwl is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

. In addition to its full text searches, saved searches, notifications and filters, RSSOwl v2.1 synchronized with the now discontinued

Google Reader Google Reader was an RSS/Atom feed aggregator operated by Google. It was created in early 2005 by Google engineer Chris Wetherell and launched on October 7, 2005, through Google Labs. Google Reader grew in popularity to support a number of progra ...

History

RSSOwl began as small project on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrorin ...

at the end of July 2003. The first public version was 0.3a.

Version 1.0

RSSOwl 1.0 was released on December 19, 2001. It was released with support for

and

News feeds. The initial release also supported exporting feeds to PDF, RTF, and HTML. This release was available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. RSSOwl 1.1 added support for toolbars and quicksearch in news feeds. Version 1.2 improved toolbar customization and added support for Atom 1.0 News feeds. Versions 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 added universal binary support for mac as well as drag and drop for tabs and a built in feed validator. RSSOwl was the SourceForge Project of the Month for January 2005.

Version 2.0

RSSOwl 2.0 was announced on March 7, 2007, at

EclipseCon The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit corporation that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization suppo ...

2007. Version 2.0 was rebuilt on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and used

db4o db4o (database for objects) was an embeddable open-source object database for Java and .NET developers. It was developed, commercially licensed and supported by Actian. In October 2014, Actian declined to continue to actively pursue and promote ...

for database storage and

Lucene Apache Lucene is a free and open-source search engine software library, originally written in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. Lucene is widely used as a ...

for text searching. Several

milestone A milestone is a numbered marker placed on a route such as a road, railway line, canal or boundary. They can indicate the distance to towns, cities, and other places or landmarks; or they can give their position on the route relative to so ...

versions were released before the final 2.0 version that added labeling of news feeds, pop-up notification of new feeds and storage of news articles in news bins. The final 2.0 version was released as milestone 9 and added support for secure password and credential storage, news filters, support for embedding Firefox 3.0 XULRunner to render news feeds, and proxy support for windows.

Version 2.1

RSSOwl 2.1 was released on July 15, 2011, with

synchronization support and new layouts.

Forks

RSSOWL is no longer maintained by its original developer however a maintained fork of it is available known a
RSSOwlnix

Features

Format support

*Full support for RSS & RDF versions 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0 *Support for Atom Syndication Format version 1.0 *Generate PDF, RTF, and HTML documents from any news including aggregations

Organization

*Powerful Newsfeed search engine working with keywords *Perform a fulltextsearch with resulthighlight on favorites and categories *Aggregate news of an entire category to one newstab *Save favorite newsfeeds in categories *Store newsfeeds in Blogrolls and share them with other people *Mail NewsTip to friends

Security

*Authentication via BASE64, Digest and NTLM *Display HTTPS secure newsfeeds

Import and Export

*Import and Export favorite newsfeeds using OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) *Import and Export your settings in RSSOwl to use them on another computer

Other

*Support for

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing ...

downloading using news filters *Integrated Newsfeed validator *Erroneous favorites are marked *Read news either in the internal browser or a Rich Text window *Blog news viewed in RSSOwl with your favorite blogging tool *Huge list of sample Newsfeeds pre-saved *Select an auto-update-interval for your favorites *View properties of a selected favorite

Internationalization

RSSOwl is translated into many languages: Bengali, Bulgarian, Czech, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian.

References

External links

* {{Aggregators 2004 software Free news aggregators Java platform software MacOS Internet software Windows Internet software Solaris software Portable software Cross-platform software News aggregator software Software using the Eclipse license