One test down

So I got the .Net framework going, and went and grabbed a copy of Aggie. The program has got some potential. It’s lightweight, it’s quick, and it puts all of your news onto a browser page, so you can see it all in one fell swoop. However, the font size is too small on that browser for full-length feeds. That is, feeds that include the entire post, like Chris Pirillo’s feed, show up as unreadbly small, even with IE tweaked to show the largest font sizes. At least it looks poor on my monitor with a 1024 by 768 setting.

The other thing that is a deal killer for me, at least in it’s current version, is that some feeds that work perfectly well in my Newzcrawler, simply don’t work in Aggie. For example, the feed for Scripting News returns a “invalid XML” message. Other feeds, like Geek’s Blog feed just aren’t accepted by Aggie at all. My own feed did that last night and then worked fine this afternoon. Again, every one of these feeds works just fine, everytime, in Newzcrawler. I really appreciate the consistency. So, Joe, can you get Aggie to work more consistently? If so, it’s definitely got potential as a smaller, quicker way to check news when you’re on the move. Not to mention the fact that Newzcrawler is going to a paid version, so they’re won’t be any updates for me unless I decide to buy it. I doubt I will.

I did download OpenOffice and get it installed as well. A quick look impressed me but I haven’t really put it through it’s paces yet. I intend to try and do some work with it tonight or tomorrow.

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