The Bottom Line
- Cyndicate offers folders, smart folders, filters, labels and flags for efficient news organizing
- Based on your own past choices, Cyndicate can rate incoming articles automatically
- Cyndicate comes with a number of display styles
- Cyndicate can be slow to update feeds and slow to operate
- It would be great for Cyndicate's automatic rating to extend to automatically applying labels
Description
- Cyndicate reads and sorts news items as well as audio or video downloads coming by RSS feeds.
- You can set up folders to organize your news items and use labels as well as simple flags, too.
- Cyndicate filters can file, flag, label and announce news items.
- Smart folders aggregate items from all feeds using flexible criteria.
- You can rate individual stories. Based on your ratings, Cyndicate can then pre-sort incoming news.
- Choose from a number of style sheets for story display or apply your own CSS file.
- Cyndicate makes it easy to share interesting items using most social bookmarking services (say Digg or del.icio.us).
- Cyndicate supports Mac OS X 10.4.
Guide Review - Cyndicate 1.1 - RSS News Feed Reader
Of course, you could have your subscriptions come to you as emails. Or you employ an RSS news feed reader that approaches your RSS feed items as if they were emails.
Cyndicate does just that, and it does it favorably well. Not only can you set up folders and have Cyndicate filter individual items (or, of course, entire feeds) into them, Cyndicate also adds flags and flexible color labels to the mix. It's easy to switch between reading individual subscriptions and reading using an email-like Inbox and folders.
If you rate items, Cyndicate can even pick up your tastes and pre-sort incoming news. (I did not fully try this out, but it should prove quite useful.) It would be great if the same talent could be applied to smart folders or labeling as well.
Enclosures such as podcasts' sound files or videos are dealt with quite intelligently. Cyndicate does not neglect the written word either, though. You can choose from a number of decent style sheets or create your own. For each feed, you can also decide whether you want the feed content or rather have Cyndicate follow the story link and display the web page instead.
Unfortunately, Cyndicate may slow down just when you'd appreciate its organizing talent most. With a larger number of subscriptions, folders, items, filters and ratings, Cyndicate can become just a bit too sluggish for a pleasant news reading experience.
If you keep up to speed with incoming news, however, Cyndicate makes for very efficient, pretty and happy following them.
