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January 18, 2005
Review: Onfolio & Lektora
The Onfolio beta has become my much-beloved feed reader of choice. Lektora tantalizes with similar features and a more responsive UI. Extended thoughts follow, after reading through my 213 feeds in both.
Onfolio
The feed reader rocks, with beautiful newspaper-style layout and clean, crisp formatting. 
I scan many feeds quickly, and instantly read any portion of any post. The organization of the feed pane in IE/FF is a joy. Creating folder- and feed- specific newspapers always brings a smile. Finally, the read/unread feature, combined with the flagging and inbox features, seals the deal. I can keep track of what I've read, and what I have yet to read, without fuss or thought. Another time-saver: the auto-feed-discovery button that finds and subscribes (and prompts as to what the feed's name and folder should be) to the RSS feed of any web page. 
However, Onfolio cops like a frog sometimes: it sports warts. Miserably slow in generating newspapers for > 25 feeds. The array of options and tie-ins threaten to turn Onfolio into an unusable Outlook replacement. Broader integration with blogging tools would be great, since I couldn't get it to integrate with this blog.
Software is worth money, of course. An acceptable price would be < $20. For a feed reader with some publishing capabilities, I'm never going to pay $50!
Lektora
Distinguishing mark: daily newspaper style feed reads. Nice formatting, and much quicker than Onfolio (after a longer startup that includes grabbing your feeds). 
However, there's no subfolders for organizing feeds, and no read/unread state feature. The lack of those two niceties cut Lektora down from Onfolio's 3x increase in feed reading speed to 2x. Lektora's pricing is TBA, so here's to hoping for a bit of sanity and reasonableness. Don't make me pay more than the price of a weekly newspaper for something that just aggregates other's content.
Both
No del.icio.us integration for favorites/bookmarking/marking to read later.
I love the newspaper format that they both take to presenting feeds. Both present "all" your feeds, as well as mini "sections" of feeds (by subfolder, by feed, [Lektora] by date). Onfolio is the most flexible in the variety of ways it can present the newspaper (by folders, by date, ascending/descending, read/unread, etc). But the sheer leap in readability due to the layout + typography of both Lektora and Onfolio have changed the way I read feeds. I will have a hard time ever going back to the Sharpreader et al "messages" style. That said, if Onfolio is still charging $50 for their reader when my beta expires, I'll happily start clicking the Lektora toolbar in my browser window instead.
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Posted by Noel at 12:27 PM
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Comments
Thought you might be interested in taking a look at our desktop smart organizer beta product. Please let me know what you think. Thanks.
http://www.viapoint.com/viapointbeta
Posted by: dan housman at February 4, 2005 12:02 PM
I'll give it a spin and let you know. Nice looking site. A screenshot or two would be nice so I could see what I'm getting into.
Posted by: barelylegalprogrammer at February 4, 2005 12:14 PM