The Bottom Line
Pros
- endo lets you organize feeds freely and automatically using smart, rule-based groups
- Feeds can be color-coded in endo, and you can blog, bookmark or flag individual items
- endo supports podcasts and other enclosures, downloading them painlessly in a separate application
Cons
- endo does not offer free-form tagging of feeds and individual items
- Smart groups in endo cannot learn from example
- endo lacks integration with online feed readers such as Google Reader
Description
- endo lets you read RSS and Atom news feeds in groups.
- Smart folders automatically collect news items corresponding to custom filtering criteria.
- Feeds can be labeled with colors, and you can flag, blog or bookmark item on del.icio.us from endo.
- Integration with Spotlight lets you find endo news items with speed and precision.
- endo supports custom style sheets and plug-ins that allow it to read any data as a feed.
- The endoBot podcast client downloads in the background and can play items or add them to iTunes.
- endo subscriptions and their state can be synchronized via a .Mac account or kula.jp.
- You can import subscriptions from OPML files, and endo exports to them, too.
- endo supports Mac OS X 10.4.
Guide Review - endo 1.0 - RSS News Feed Reader
endo clearly favors the latter approach. Feeds are organized and read in groups, and smart groups automatically collect all items corresponding to filtering criteria. Still, after you have worked through the very nice and very charming setup wizard, endo might greet you with a rather chaotic assortment of headlines and buttons.
All is very colorful, but little is immediately clear. The hues stem from endo's ability to assign colors to feeds, in which it liberally engages itself — not a bad habit. Unfortunately, individual items cannot be thus labeled or tagged freely (a uniform flag is available).
Soon, you learn that to organize your news you need to visit the "Subscription Manager", which is also where smart groups can be set up. A highlight in principle is endo's display of news: a few keystrokes will get you through the pre-grouped news fast. Unfortunately, this does not always work out quite that way yet, and the structure of endo's menu and context menus needs some getting used to as well.
Some day all will possibly hum as smoothly as endoBot, endo's great small and separate application that downloads podcasts seamlessly in the background. In the meantime, you can make endo look the way you like it best (remove tags and summaries) and hum along.
