I was reading Ben Hammersley’s weblog. Brent Simmons is highly responsive to user comments. I am too cheap to pay US$40 for NetNewsWire, but am forever grateful for the Lite version, as it has served me well. I am therefore offering my HK$0.2.
Unlike Ben, I have not seen Shrook 2.0, nor have I used Shrook 1.x for any substantial period of time. From the feature list, Shrook 2.0 is supposed to have custom filters. Filters (based on keywords or regular expressions) are difficult to use, and if it needs setting up then it is a big minus to usability.
I recently discovered Findory, which displays a bunch of news, tracks the clickthrus, and from such data customizes the page on further reloads. I have only played with it a few times, but it seems to work rather well. I suspect it works by Bayesian filtering and classification, with a customized dictionary/thesaurus of keywords. Adding a Bayesian filtering and classification engine to NetNewsWire could provide some neat features.
As for the UI, add a “My Favourites” item in the subscription panel containing automagic customized items. The Bayesian engine may be tuned by clickthru and user-intervention (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird “Junk” style, but with an “Interesting” button instead). RE and keyword based filtering for the geeks. When viewing the “Site Subscriptions”, mark the customized items in the headline panel as such for easy reference.
Call home anonymously (optional of course), then Brent gets a profile of users’ interests. Such data would be good for finetuning the standard subscription list. Automatic standard subscription list update and alerts of new, interesting and popular websites would be nice.