| I've never used Google Reader for just these very reasons, and have been using Thunderbird for several years, even though Thunderbird is hardly ideal. The disadvantages of existing web-based readers really outweigh the one feature that's really superior in web-based clients, that being ubiquitous synchronization. What I'd love to see in a reader: * Email-like interface * Custom folder hierarchy, allowing filtering of specific feeds into specific folders. * A "unified inbox" that shows new items from all feeds, outside the normal folder hierarchy. * Highly customizable text themes, allowing font, size, and color defaults to be easily configured without having to write custom CSS. * Automatic retrieval of the full article for RSS items that don't include full text, parsed through a readable/readability-like filter, conforming to the user's defined text theme. * Automatic retrieval of the comments feed for each article, to be displayed in a separate pane or tab. * Integrated streaming of audio and video for podcast feeds, with playback positions remembered from session to session. * No feed recommendations, no integrated "feed gallery", no integration with any external sites - especially Facebook; at most, "share link" buttons for individual sites that can be customized and disabled individually by the user (so, e.g., I could optionally add a button to my UI for posting the artice to HN or reddit). I'd be willing to pay for a client that had this featureset. |