Novobot

A better way to read news

Compared to the other feed readers, Novobot offers a better way of reading your news feeds. The news feed content display pane offers full Unicode support for international feeds and newspaper-like headline view for efficient browsing. The content is displayed with full formatting, just as the feed's author intended, and is available at any time, even when offline.

All major feed formats supported

Novobot supports all major feed formats, including RSS, RDF and Atom. You can also use NOV channels from Novobot 2.x that allow you to customise the way Novobot retrieves headlines from web pages, including pages that do not offer a news feed. Novobot also supports the new feed:// and rss:// internet protocols for easy feed addition from your web browser.

3-pane window layout

Novobot uses 3-pane wide vertical layout for its main window. This illustrates the channel (feed) hierarchy in the library and leads you from the folders (tags) to the actual content. Channels are displayed in a separate pane along with useful additional information, like number of unread headlines, type of the channel, and time of the last update.

Feed categories (or tags, or folders)

You can create a hierarchy of folders to categorise (tag) news channels using drag-and-drop or copy-paste operations. Channels can be assigned to several folders, which allows for extremely flexible feed tagging and helps to keep your channels organised.

Ticker

A unique feature among other feed readers is a ticker with scrolling headlines which stays on top of other windows and provides continuous unobtrusive at-a-glance news updates. This way you can stay up-to-date with current events while working with other programs.

Staying up to date

There is a Refresh action to get all headlines in one step. You can also schedule your feed library updates using many available options so that when you come to work or home the latest headlines await you. And this is all done in a feed provider-friendly way, avoiding "hammering" host servers.

Reading the news

Downloaded headlines are saved to cache to enable offline reading. Only unread headlines are shown, and headlines remember their "visited" status. A headline can be marked as read or locked (protected). Protected headlines are preserved for later reading when you mark channels as read (clear it). The reading position is preserved for each library folder (tag), so the next time you run Novobot, you can continue reading from where you left off.

Adding feeds

You can add feeds manually by entering the feed's link into the Add Channel dialog, or you can import the existing NOV channel files entire directory tree at once. You can also import OPML files which makes migration from other news readers a piece of cake.

Little things that make life easier

There are numerous features in Novobot that improve user experience. Tray icon which shows the current status, support for proxies to accomodate corporate users, user-specific data storage for shared computers and context-sensitive online help all make Novobot a pleasure to use.

Intelligent installer and updater

Novobot uses a new Updater/GD technology to provide frequent software updates over the internet. The Updater can refresh existing parts or install additional Novobot components that provide new features or fix problems. This way you can be sure you always have access to the latest version of the software. And the best news is that updates are free for all Novobot registered customers.

Still reading?

If you have made it this far, go get Novobot and try it yourself.

Warning: reading news in Novobot is highly addictive. You have been warned!