Cokane

JConsumer

This is to announce the start of a personal project called JConsumer...

As I wrote some time back I am a huge fan of an application called FeedDemon. It is a software which you can use to track RSS feeds, from weblogs or news sites or whatever.
I use it to keep up to date on a number of techie sites and blogs which I read regularly to keep up to date on the latest happenings in the world of software development.

Anyway another interest of mine is the idea of personalised web search which presents information suited to the _idea_ of what you are looking for, not the hard text of what you are looking for. RSS syndication offers a wonderful chance for people to access information on tap from a number of sources via a single interface, giving them what they want to see, not what a search engine thinks they want to see. More refined searching should be possible allowing people to access the information they need more quickly and with less stress.

JConsumer brings these two ideas together.

So yes, JConsumer is _another_ reader of RSS feeds. But what I hope to do is look into allowing it to group and search feeds and individual items in a more flexible way than is presently done in most newsreaders I have tried. One thing I hate about blog readers at the moment is going through several blog entries about the same topic and seeing people just expressing the same idea or discussing the same link with different language. So I hope to build a nice app to make feed reading more pleasurable for myself :o)

Why not take an existing open source reader and build on that? Well I'd like to start from scratch to improve my Swing programming abilities. It's claimed nowadays that Swing is fast _if_ you know how to code it properly, and this is what I hope to learn. Also, I'm a little hesitant about building on other people's code, especially if it's covered by a viral open source license. I may decide to release JConsumer later on, either open or closed source, for people to use and I'd prefer if it was 100% my own code :o)

Will post updates often hopefully.

Posted by Cokane at May 19, 2004 08:30 PM