Tim Sodhi’s Weblog

For the longest time I resisted RSS feeds, dismissing them as too cumbersome to keep track of, and rather too concise for my needs. Over time though, with the plethora of sites I keep track of, not to mention the trackers and feeds for breaking news on CNN, BBC, I decided to make the shift to RSS. I toyed with subscribing to individual feeds in Firefox, but soon gave up on that idea. With around eleven feeds, I couldn’t keep a history of older feed stories, as well as, mark them as read/unread. I looked to Apple Mail, but apart from a marginal improvement from Firefox (in terms of history), I didn’t see a benefit.

Enter Google Reader. It does it all, aggregate feeds into one feed, and allows for a history as well as marking the same (starring in Google terms). I can access my feeds and read/unread status from any computer/device. Wonderful, but only restricted to the actual GReader site. That was until I found Socialite (formerly Eventbox).

Socialite supports Google Reader in it’s entirety, allowing one to subscribe to a feed from the client, unsubscribe, mark as read/unread, star/unstar, etc. With Growl support, this is by far the best Google Reader RSS feed client for the Mac. What’s more, this client integrates support for various social networking APIs such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. A definite MUST try.

Scathing review alert. I just got an email from Collectorz.com proclaiming “benefits and features” available to the Windows users of Movie Collector have now been released for the Mac platform in the latest version of this Movie catalog software. One phrase comes to mind – STAY away.

The biggest reason? They have stripped away all credible sources for Movie information lookup. IMDB, Amazon, you name it, it’s gone. Instead we have their Collectorz.com database which has spotty information at best, and is in no way complete, or even close to it. That added to the confused layout and “new” features make this an upgrade one can well afford to miss.

For me, personally, the omission of IMDB lookup is unforgivable. The company claims that it was done to improve information available to the users, or some random excuse, but the reasons are clear. They want to maximize their profits, by making us users submit movie/film information to their servers. In short, we pay to use our own movie/film metadata.

No thanks, I love the previous versions of this software and will give this version 3.0 pro a miss and two thumbs down. End scathing review.