Spb Insight - News And Blogs On The Go
Spb Software House has done it again with another great product. Their
latest, Spb Insight, is an easy to use yet powerful RSS/Atom News Reader.
Spb Insight
In the age of the knowledge worker information is coming at us from all angles. RSS news aggregators have become a necessity to keep up with all of our favorite news/blog sites. If you spend your day in front of a computer it’s not hard to stay up-to-date, but if you are always on the go this can be a difficult task. That’s where Spb Insight comes in. You can download all your feeds and then read them offline anywhere.
Background
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has become a standard web publishing format. Most web portals (Yahoo, Google, etc.) and e-mail clients (Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc.) now support adding RSS feeds. RSS feeds are displayed in XML, which is a structured text format used to exchange data between systems and applications.
Getting Started
Insight refers to all feeds as “channels.” Before you get started make sure you have an internet connection on your Pocket PC. This can be done through ActiveSync or via a wireless connection. You next need to add some channels. To add a channel you tap on New and you can then choose the channel source:
Adding Channels
If you are already RSS savvy you can simply enter the URL for your feed. One of the nice features of Spb Insight is the vast online channel catalog that is available. You can choose from a choice of up to thousands of channels (depending on your language).
Channel Selection
Once you have added the channels you want to select Menu->Update All. Insight will download the new articles for all the channels you have configured.
Read Anywhere
Once you have downloaded your articles you no longer need an internet connection. To view the articles simply tap on the channel.
Article List
When you see an article of interest tap on it to read.
View Article
After you view each article it’s marked as “read” so you’ll know which articles you still have to read. You can mark all articles read by selecting Mark All as Read from Menu.
On The Go
If you are the type of person that is always on the go, you should have plenty of opportunities to update your channels. If you have a wireless interface on your Pocket PC you can take advantage of many free wireless hotspots. For example, say you head to your favorite coffee house to pick up your daily latte. If you fire up your wireless connection and tell Insight to update all channels, it should easily be done updating by the time they finish making your drink.
Conclusion
During my normal day I tend to have periods of time where I’m waiting – sitting on the phone on hold, standing in line at the store, waiting for a meeting to start. With Spb Insight I can turn this downtime into something useful. This is a great time saver for me!
Spb Insight is a great tool to add to the arsenal of today’s knowledge worker.
You can download Spb Insight from the Spb Software House web site.
- Al Harrington's blog
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I was really excited about Spb Insight when I first heard about it a few days ago. But I'm not sure that it is all it is cracked up to be. Granted, like all Spb programs, it seems to be a good quality program but it is also missing a lot IMHO.
For example, (1) there's no today screen plug-in; (2) unless I'm missing something, if you want to view pictures and full articles you still have to manually request each article be downloaded while you have a live internet connection (i.e., there's no way to automatically have all articles downloaded). This really limits the program's mobility and I hope I'm wrong about it; and (3) there are no "shortcut buttons" like some other programs have (e.g., a button next to "channels" and "menu" that refreshes all channels...see Iliumsoft's NewsBreak for an example).
None of these things make Insight a bad program and I've only used it for a combined total of about 5 minutes, but my initial reaction is that yes, this is a good program, but no, it's not so much better than the one I already have that I would be willing to spend $20 to acquire it.
I was one of the judges of the newsreader category in this year's PPCMag Awards and I thought it was really striking how many quality Newsreading programs there were but it was also striking that none of them had all the features you would want in a newsreader program...they were all missing one thing or another. IMHO, Spb Insight seems to continue this trend and I'm not quite sure what to think about it.
The problem I see with these programs is it leads to information overload. It's nice to be up to date on certain things but there has to be a limit to how much information you really need while mobile.
Here is my list of features that would make an RSS feed program perfect for me:
1: Allow content filtering before download based on a number of different criterias like subject, category, source, author and others.
2: Allow content to be downloaded and displayed offline in a newspaper style layout. Grouped and organized in specific sections.
3: Images to be resized for a PDA friendly size.
4: Content downloaded to be deleted as it is read or after a certain timeframe if not read.
5: Content can be easily tagged for later reference and not deleted.
6: Allow for easy input of new RSS feeds.
7: Allow the ability to search for new feeds similar to how newsgroups work.
In an age where acquiring information just because we can easily will lead to imformation overload. We need to be selective in what we get before we get it.
Thanks for the comment. In my review I didn't really go into the templates, but they are very powerful. Here is a link to documentation on templates:
http://www.spbinsight.com/documentation.php
You can also get info from the Spb Forums: http://spbdn.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=16