Well this is cool, I can just put my feedback here and be sure the Jyte folks will see it ;) [warning: this is a huge post, but they did ask very nicely for proper feedback]

First the good - as I said before, I really like the state feature. It’s something I’d been thinking about for a while and the way Jyte does it seems pretty sensible. You get the shared state (and some of the platform independence) of something like bloglines, with the richer UI a “proper” RSS client can provide. (We’re kindof talking fat client here).

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this stuff is as I said before - that I constantly switch between machines and OSen. This isn’t currently very compatible with tracking a large blogroll. Also, the Pocket PC RSS readers I’ve tried on my iPAQ have all sucked moderately hard, and I’ve been thinking about writing one myself - hopefully solving the state issue somewhere along the way..

I also do like the search based interface. It’s kinda like a datacentric approach to aggregation - you define a list of searches, e.g. ‘pocketpc AND RSS‘ (to replicate classic aggregator behaviour you define a search on a blog, e.g: ‘feed:”http://linuxbrit.co.uk/feed/rss2/”‘). Leads to some very interesting possibilities.

When I said earlier that I didn’t like the UI, I didn’t exactly say why.. First consider the UI’s of the two graphical RSS readers I use regularly (we’ll leave out the raggle I always have running in a screen session, it’s text-based): syndigator, and sharpreader. Then look at Jyte..

The main thing I really like about those first two clients (apart from that they’re pretty similar so switching between them is painless) is that the 3rd pane of their classic 3-pane view, is rendered HTML. Two reasons this is important to me: a) reading gadget blogs shows me all the pretty pictures of yummy gadgets inline, and b) I read a bunch of link heavy blogs and want to bounce off those links.

My main browser (on any platform) is Firefox. Tab crazy firefox. The way I use my GUI RSS readers on windows (sharpreader) and linux (syndigator) (and I’m sure I’m not alone) is this: I storm through my favourite sources, clicking on every link that looks interesting. By the time I’m done my firefox window (which has remained quietly in the background thanks to the tabbrowser extensions plugin) has anything from 20 to 50 open tabs.

Then I wade through these, maybe blog a couple, bookmark a couple for later, etc. After than I head back to my RSS reader and check out a random selection of other “low priority” sources that I didn’t hit in the first run.

The main problem I have with Jyte is that the “3rd pane” doesn’t render the HTML from such feeds that provide it - Jyte renders the marked down description instead.

This means that my routine breaks :) Say I’m reading boingboing, which is always full of great links to follow and which always ends each article with a “link” link… In Jyte I don’t see the links, just a chunk of text - to see which words were links and maybe click them I have to hit “more”, which opens up an HTML view of the article (on the site, following the permalink) in a new tab *within Jyte*, which I then need to switch to in order to get at the links etc. Any links I click on from there open in Jyte too (or I can right click and open in a new IE window) but there’s seemingly no option to use my default browser - firefox.

Also, using the marked down description doesn’t play well with certain RSS‘d linkblogs - including mine ;)

So there we go, nothing too major but that’s what I didn’t write earlier. If Jyte was somewhat more configurable, could render the embedded HTML in pane 3, and allow me say what happens to links I click on, I’d be a lot happier, but obviously that’s heavily biased by my own personal RSS routine :D The fact that I like the search/state feature so much means that now I’m running it alongside sharpreader on my XP box for now.