The Bottom Line
Pears is a simple, but functional RSS feed reader that gets you through the news in no time. It lacks some more advanced features (searching, filters, indexes), though.
Pros
- Pears has a clean and functional interface
- Can display changes to updated items
- Uses Python, works on many platforms
Cons
- Pears offers no searching and filtering
- Doesn't allow you to organize feeds in folders
- Pears' HTML parsing is not perfect
Description
- Pears aggregates news from RSS and Atom feeds.
- Articles are displayed in a three-pane interface in Pears.
- Pears lets you specify the frequency of automatic updates per feed.
- Pears can keep a certain number of articles (configurable per feed) archived for offline reading.
- If a news item is updated, Pears can show you the differences like a diff tool.
- Importing from and exporting to OPML makes your Pears subscriptions portable.
- Pears's functionality can be expanded with plug-ins.
- Pears supports Python 2.2 and wxPython 2.4 on their platforms.
Guide Review - Pears 1.7 - RSS Feed Reader
Do you like pears? I do.
They're not exotic in many parts of the world and there's little extravaganza surrounding them. They are simple and simply tasty.
Pears the RSS reader is similar. It lacks some functionality (folders to organize feeds, for example, or searching, or filters/virtual folders), but it comes with a simple and functional interface that makes weeding through web site updates, blogs and news taste good.
Keyboard shortcuts and a bit unusual, but useful, mouse mappings let you use Pears fast, and it's nice how you can configure per feed how many articles Pears should keep for offline reading. Older news are deleted automatically. Another neat feature is how Pears can display what has changed when an item is updated.
