Attensa RSS Reader for Outlook

October 20, 2005

I had heard about this utility a couple of weeks ago. I decided to download it last week to try it out. I had used SharpReader before my computer got reimaged a couple of weeks ago.

I have been reading a book called Taking Back Your Life, Using Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized. One of the concepts in the book is that you minimize your collecting points for information. This is what motivated me to try Attensa.

Here is my review:

Attensa worked much like SharpReader in that it created folders in Outlook based on the categories you want to sort your feeds into. You can keep things like you do in SharpReader and delete the posts that you are not interested in. You can choose three different way to have the posts displayed: plain text, default view which describes itself as faster and richer and then source web page contents (which they say is the slowest) which looks like the website. I have been using the Default view and the one quirk I have found in it is that it displayed apostrophes as boxes. Attensa has tag functions but I have not yet played with that. You can forward the articles through Outlook to others and you can post to your blog with the Attensa utility bar in Outlook but I have not yet tried that either.

In comparison to other readers, I have not used the RSS reader in Firefox and I did a little with Bloglines. I had also been playing with Google’s reader but was not real keen on it because I could not get rid of posts that I was not interested in. Attensa has provided me a pretty good solution as I am trying to integrate things from the Taking Back Your Life book.