SauceReader (Synop)
Since Mai 14, 2004, I'm using intensively Sauce Reader from Synop and I would like to summarize my impression, as an "evaluation phase conclusion":
What's Cool
- Great user interface: clean, intuitive Outlook 2003 style user interface
- Sauce Reader toolbar available in Internet Explorer
- Very good usability
- Since this version: performance, stability and a quite good memory foot-print
- Customization of keyboard shortcuts
- Great desktop alert when new feed items arrive
- Feed discovery and one-click subscription to RSS and Atom feeds
- Pop-up blocking, complete default browser support
- Integrated weblogging environment with full posting functionality (including image uploading)
- Great full-text search functionality (within archived items)
- Support for content in any language or character encoding
- Automatic application updates
- Support of proxy, great feature to stay tuned at work
- Free for personal use, reasonnable price for commercial use ($25US per license)
- 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. The development team improved a lot the possibilities, stability and performance. But I still prefer to use the very simple Blogger web interface. Perhaps out of habit? Let's see.
Conclusion
All in all, I still think that Sauce Reader is the best aggregator at this moment (on Microsoft platform). The last developments of this tool (five releases now!) give me a very convincing impression of the Synop's capability and user orientation.
PS1: have a look at the reviews of Robert Scoble and of Laurent.
PS2: my review was linked by Synop on their product homepage ;-)
