GreatNews for Windows

The news is good, but not great, for this RSS feedreader. Posts from news sites, blogs, and feed-enabled sites are displayed in GreatNews' well-designed interface, but a pair of problems detract from this program.

Opening with a few default subscriptions, users can easily add additional feeds, categories, and move subscriptions from group to group. All categories and sites are organized in a tree menu with a right-hand viewing pane. The window presents the items from a feed in two columns, much like a newspaper. A headline and summary are displayed for each article. By default, a single click opens a selected item in the program's viewing pane, while a double click opens the story in your default browser.

The ability to change those settings, and a host of others, is where GreatNews really excels. You can completely customize this newsreader, from the opening screen when the program launches to automatic updates when you select a feed category, and nearly all changes involve simple radio buttons or check boxes.

Everything worked great when viewing and updating the preloaded feeds, but there were some occasional problems adding new feeds. We loved the program's feed autodiscovery feature, but sometimes GreatNews would freeze during the process and had to be shut down through Task Manager.

Testers complained that in the space of a single session the program's multiple update notifications turned from informative to irritation. Save for the occasional freeze and update hounding, we recommend this program without reservation. Even with those issues, GreatNews is still one of the more easy-to-use feedreaders we've seen.