The public beta for the Pluck Firefox extension has been made available for download.
While I'm still a devoted Bloglines user, the Pluck Firefox extension is pretty sweet, and their user interface isn't bad. If their extension picks up some features and things like the unread counts get ironed out, I think Pluck may give Bloglines a run for their money.
A few minutes ago, I received the same comment for the second time. This isn't entirely unusual, you may be thinking, and you're right. Sometimes people hit "Submit" (or "Post", or whatever you use) twice and it just happens. Not the case here. This was the same comment that was left over a week ago, on an entirely different entry.
What's worse is that this person is just advertising. If you happened across the other comment, you would see that I was already wondering if it should be allowed, but I decided to let it through. Not the case any longer. Two nearly identical comments, on completely separate posts, and neither of them actually addresses the posts, except in a spammish way? Sorry, Charlie. They're gone.
Lest you happen across them, the software being advertised are Blogbot and Greatnews. I'm not going to link to them, even with a "nofollow" tag, because frankly someone who decides to leave comment spam of this nature just ticks me off. The first was marginal, but it at least was close. This time? No such luck.
Now that the beta is public, here are a few thoughts on it.
The integration with Firefox is sweet. The sidebar works very well, and I like having it there so I can quickly open any of the feeds which I am monitoring. Well done. The appearance of the Pluck data is also nice. It's an easy-to-use, easy-on-the-eyes interface, somewhere above the bare-bones appearance of Bloglines and the oh-so-pretty look of Newsgator. It could be very usable on a regular basis, and the work on it is very nice.
And... that's about it for the really good stuff. It seems to me like it has promise, but at the moment I find it lacking. This isn't for lack of a product - it's really very well done. It's just that I often find myself looking for functionality that I am used to in Bloglines.
This doesn't mean it won't ever be there, and it doesn't mean that Pluck won't work for a lot of people. But for me, it doesn't quite work the way I want it to work. Bloglines does what I need and allows me the options to change it if it doesn't. Pluck seems very force-fed, in that if it's what I need, great. If not, I need to adapt or go elsewhere.
That said, what don't I like? I'm glad you asked.
While the appearance is nice, I've encountered what appear to be some CSS issues, with sections of text overlapping the next one, and so on. This is especially prevalent when you collapse and expand items, particularly those containing images. Boing Boing is a great example of a feed that sees this happen on a regular basis.
The spacing of the items leaves something to be desired. Each one contains the feed name, even when you are viewing only one feed (and it is also in the sidebar and the title of the tab). Not needed, get rid of it. The date is off on the side and takes up a line all itself. When collapsed, each item takes up a whopping four lines - the feed title, item title, date and a blank line. Too much.
Unread counts don't work reliably. It looks like the unread items are bolded when you first pull up the feed, but then all items are marked as read even if you've only viewed the first page. That doesn't make sense. Because of this, it's nearly impossible to tell where you left off. I really like that Bloglines only shows me unread items, but I have the option to view others if I so desire. Perhaps the Pluck folks will add another toggle to the top that allows for viewing of only unread items, instead of having both read and unread inline, with only a bold title to differentiate them. This reason alone is one that will cause me not to use the service.
While there are loads of references to the feed you are reading, you can't seem to get to the site - only to the individual items. This, despite having the feed in the sidebar, the feed in the breadcrumb at the top of the page and even having the feed title in each individual item. Surely they can allow for a link to get to the site itself.
The one-button collapse/expand function is nice. I really like it. Too bad it doesn't save your settings on a per-feed basis. There are some feeds (think Slashdot) where I find it faster to read in collapsed mode, only expanding as necessary. There are other feeds, such as those of friends, where I read every article and I want them expanded. Why make me click every time I load a new feed? Bloglines allows me to save this setting.
Speaking of those buttons - I think they used to have tips on them when you hovered over them. They don't appear to now - or they don't appear to work. So if I'm curious about what they do, the only way I can find out now is to click them. And the result isn't always obvious. It's a nice interface. Add some tips to make it more usable.
Finally, I like to be able to open links in the same tab or a new tab as I see fit. The sidebar only allows me to choose one or the other. How about making it so that the middle-click can open an item in a new tab, just like it works in the regular browser window?
All-in-all, it's a nice job. I'm happy to see such a good product. But I don't think it's enough to sway me from Bloglines at this point. Perhaps the beta will work through some of these things!
