Windows Phone Thoughts: Spb Insight Provides Window On The World

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Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Spb Insight Provides Window On The World

Posted by Jon Westfall in "SOFTWARE" @ 07:00 AM


Innovative Features
Insight sports a few nice options that allow you to tailor your news feeds and manage them effectively. As stated earlier, the program lets you specify where your channels will "live" right off the bat, to curb on memory usage, and it offers an online database of channels. One of the neat features is the ability to search that database for channels that interest you. After entering the search query below, I was inundated with many results that had "news" in the title. This would be a great way for those of you who do not have an OPML file of "favorite feeds" yet and want to get into the whole RSS thing. I know before I jumped in, I was very overwhelmed by the idea that I had to seek out all of those little XML buttons on my favorite sites and try to add them or enter them into a program. This takes a little less time than doing that, and it allows you to seek out those XML buttons on your favorite sites, not just sites that you rarely visit but want to know about.


Figure 7: Searching for a channel.

Returning to the management side of RSS feeds, anyone who has ever used an RSS reader has probably at one time found that space on their device was getting quite small. The options in Insight allow you to specify where the content is stored and also to see how much space it's currently taking up. Clicking on "Default Channel Options" brings up the defaults for each channel in regards to how much content is stored on your device, and when to delete old items to make way for new. This can be changed on a channel-by-channel basis, allowing you to keep an extensive history of your favorite channels, and a rather short history of channels that you frequently check.


Figure 8: Setting up the size limits for the channels.


Figure 9: Cleaning options.

Spb has never been a company scared of innovation, but I must admit, the options in Insight left me wanting a bit more. Perhaps integration with Pocket Outlook so that I could forward items to friends (or the email gateway to my blog) or more options on how to display my channels (a timeline view would be nice, to have all items from all channels integrated into one view showing when the item was posted). If previous product evolution is similar for Insight as it has been for other Spb products, then I predict we'll see massive additions of options within the next few years as new releases come out. Still, there are some features I'm baffled that Spb didn't include.

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