TOOLS: Sauce Reader

I already published two articles about Sauce Reader on Mai 24 and Mai 14. Synop released on last Friday a new version:

Sauce Reader v1.5 (beta)

I’m using intensively Sauce Reader since more than a month and I would like to summarize my impression:

What’s Cool

  • Great user interface
  • Very good usability
  • Since this version: performance, stability and a quite good memory foot-print
  • Free for personal use, reasonnable price for commercial use ($25US per license)
  • Customization of keyboard shortcuts
  • Great desktop alert
  • Support of proxy, great feature to stay tuned at work
  • Last but not least, very active development team, professional alpha- and beta-phase
  • Room for improvement

  • I’m still not totally convinced by the “posting” module because of the way the HMTL decoration is integrated in (specially the “P” and “BR” tags). I still prefer to use the very simple Blogger web interface…
  • Conclusion

    All in all, I think that Sauce Reader is the best aggregator at this moment. The last developments of this tool (three releases now) give me a very convincing impression of the Synop’s capability and user orientation.

    PS: Laurent also posted some comments about this new release.

    PRIVATE: how can you know you are getting older ;-)

    [Adapted and via Loic – in French]

    I’m 32 years old and sometimes, I already feel that I’m getting older. Some ways to find out if it is the case for yourself (it just works if you are more or less in the same age as I):

  • A lot of students who will enter the University this year are born in 1985 (!)
  • They’ve never sung “We are the World, we are the children” or “Sunday bloody Sunday”
  • They’ve never heard something about “Raider”, they just know “Twix”
  • They’ve never played with an Atari or a Commodore64
  • They’ve perhaps never played at PacMan
  • They’ve never seen a 5 1/4 floppy
  • They don’t really understand what’s a LP
  • They don’t know how to watch TV without a remote control
  • They cannot image that somebody could watch a black-and-white TV
  • They think that James Bond was always played by Pierce Brosman
  • They think that Mickael Jackson was always white
  • They don’t know J.R.
  • Etc.
  • So, let’s just think about the fact that THESE guys will enter the University this year and that THEY are young now.

    Other symptoms that you/we are getting older:

  • You understand the text above and you said at a minimum two times “my God”
  • You make sometimes some sport, perhaps two or three times yearly, and you tell everybody that you are making sport
  • The young people and the children are using “Mister/Madam” when they are talking with you
  • When you finished to read this blog, you decided to send it to some friends and you are convinced they will love it.
  • Keep cool, the only “good news” is that we are ALL getting older, even the young students who are reading this blog and are now laughing ;-)

    NEWS: geographical representation of Google’s queries

    Let’s have a look at this cool geographical representation (small Quicktime movie) of the relative number of queries to the Google’s web site. Extract of the Google’s explanation:

    Coolest stop on the tour – A three-dimensional rotating image of the world on permanent display on a large flat panel monitor in the office of the engineer who created it. What makes it special is the toggle switch that allows you to view points of light representing real time searches rising from the surface of the globe toward space, color coded by language. Toggle and you can see traffic patterns for the entire Internet. Worth a trip to the second floor.