Straw is a syndicated news reader for GNOME. It is pretty, and it features me in its screenshots, so it must be good. It has a three-pane interface like NetNewsWire for Mac OS X. It is written by Juri Pakaste, and it uses my ultra-liberal RSS locator to find feeds and my ultra-liberal RSS parser to read them.
(Actually, it’s better than that. It tries to use a real XML parser first, and if that works, it displays a smily face and a tooltip indicating that the feed contains well-formed XML, and that we like well-formed XML. And otherwise it falls back on my ultra-liberal parser so you can still read the news you want to read. This seems like an excellent compromise between the perfect world that developers yearn for and the real world that end users inhabit.)
Straw is Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL. A little voice in the back of my head is murmuring something about the impossibility of high quality Free Software for end users, but I’m sick and tired (literally), so let’s all just admit that occasionally you get more than you pay for, and leave it at that.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim
