General Disarray

Shrook 2 - RSS and Atom for Mac OS X:

Shrook is a next-generation news reader that is not only easy to use, but offers advanced features not available to Mac users anywhere else. It supports all versions of RSS and Atom. Oh, and it’s free.

I never thought that desktop email clients were useful. But then I started managing a bunch of different Gmail accounts and found that (a) Gmail worked well with desktop clients because I could archive my pop messages and still read them when using the browser interface and (b) it is way too annoying to log in and log out of 3 or 4 different accounts. So now I use Mail.app.

And then I thought that desktop blog clients were useless, until I started managing a bunch of different WordPress blogs and got tired of logging in and out to post. So I bought ecto, which makes it a lot easier to create and manage meaningful (and meaningless…) blog entries. I wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t found a blogging platform that I really liked that also integrated with a high-quality desktop client.

The point is this: web apps and desktop apps are complementary. Web apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Writely, NumSum and Bloglines probably won’t replace desktop apps — they’ll just make them far more useful. For me, this point has already been proven by WordPress.com and Gmail.

Shrook is more proof of concept. I’ve been using Bloglines and Google Reader, thinking that desktop readers would only tie me to my desktop. But Shrook is a great reader that bridges that gap and offers a lot of new functions that no other aggregator, browser-based or desktop, has. It lets you synchronize your desktop client with a shrook.com account, so multiple machines running Shrook will stay synched, and you can check your feeds from a browser as well. This is a paid service ($20/year), but the client is freeware. I think that this is a great strategy.

Cool client features include:

• iTunes-like smart groups (like smart playlists) that create feed groups based on keywords
• An iTunes-like browsing interface, so you can view feeds one-by-one or in a “river of news” format
• Podcasting integration: If Shrook detects a podcast, it lets you view the text in the reader, but it also adds to audio file to your iTunes library automatically
• Flagging (just like starring in Google Reader) is very convenient as a way to save something for later without going to any great lengths
• Easy feed searching with a search bar that mirrors Camino, iTunes, Safari and Finder
• Mark all read: This is a must-have feature
• Integration with ecto (Google Reader has BlogThis!, but I always wanted something that would let me send stuff to my WordPress blogs (besides the ectoize bookmarklet, which never worked with Firefox)

Moreover, the strategy of selling web integration as a service and distributing the client for free is a great business idea. The synchronization service is innovative and worth paying for (for RSS geeks, that is). And it will generate more revenue than the client would (assuming it cost, say, $30 and wouldn’t become obsolete for 2-3 years). I wonder if more application-service combinations will arise. Imagine if Microsoft made a basic version of Word available for free, but created a document-collaboration subscription service through Windows Live. This is an obvious extension of the open-source the software but charge for tech-support strategy. And increasingly, computing is about service integration — think about all of the focus on XML, RSS and ODT.