You can find a nice review of RSSOwl over here. Overall RSSOwl receives a rating of Very Good. Thank's for that!

I just wanted to follow up and comment on how to install RSSOwl on Windows 8.1:
In order to run RSSOwl on either Windows, Mac or Linux, you will need to install Java. Luckily this is a fast and easy process on any of the operating systems. For Windows, just open http://java.com and click on the link to download Java. Follow the instructions after double click on the downloaded program and you are all set!

If you also think RSSOwl deserves a good rating, please leave a review on our project page. Thanks!

If you are using RSSOwl on the Mac, you will be happy to hear that RSSOwl will run on any Mac OS version as long as Java is installed. I am now on Mac OS X 10.10 and RSSOwl just works fine.

However, one annoying issue I see is a reappearing dialog from the firewall that will ask you to allow incoming connections for RSSOwl whenever you start RSSOwl:

You will only see this dialog if your firewall is turned on. Regardless of what you choose, the dialog will always come back when you restart RSSOwl. The reason for this is that Mac OS can only remember your selection for applications that are signed. RSSOwl is not signed by default, but you can quickly do so from the Mac OS terminal:

sudo codesign --force --deep --sign - <path to RSSOwl.app>

For example:

sudo codesign --force --deep --sign - /Applications/RSSOwl.app

You should first remove RSSOwl from the list of applications in the firewall settings. When you now run RSSOwl and pick an option from the dialog, you will not be asked again from then on!

RSSOwl is very powerful when it comes to searching or filtering news by topic. Given the current world cup in Brazil, let's try to find out how RSSOwl can help us finding related news to this event.

Searching across News
The fastest way to get some results is by searching across all news you are subscribed to (Edit | Search News). Just type your topic and see results below.

The most relevant results will show up sorted to the top. This gives you a quick overview of the results. You can refine your search by adding more criteria.

Saved Searches
If you are interested in search results for a particular topic, you can actually subscribe to this search as if it was a feed (File | New | Saved Search). Saved searches take a search and make it available from the feeds list. Whenever unread news come in and match your search, you will see the counter going up for the search.

A saved search behaves just like any other feed you are subscribed to.

News Filters
Finally, with news filters (Tools | News Filters) you have a very powerful tool at hand to define custom actions RSSOwl should perform whenever an article matches your search criteria. For example you can choose to be notified whenever an article talks about the world cup.

If you are interested in other features that help you manage and search your subscriptions, check out our Overview section.

Recently I got asked if it was possible to revert RSSOwl's database to a previous point in time. This can be useful in case you performed an action in RSSOwl that is not reversible, such as using the clean-up wizard to delete feeds. Luckily RSSOwl frequently stores backups of your profile. Check out this FAQ entry for more details on how to restore an older backup. The entry is typically only being used in case RSSOwl decided to stop working, but for this case it can also be used.

I decided to update the disk image for Mac to the latest version 2.2.1. It is now the default download for Macs from SourceForge. You can download it from here. Next step is to get RSSOwl into the Mac App store. Uh oh, should I even try? Let's discuss here.

After some time without news from RSSOwl, I am happy to release version 2.2.1. You will now find quick access to common actions like archiving or labeling right below the article content. Especially for articles with lots of content this means you no longer have to scroll all the way up to the title to run actions on the news. In addition, some broken keyword feeds have been fixed and new ones added.

If you are interested in providing new features or bug fixes to RSSOwl, please check out our GitHub repository and provide pull requests. I will be happy to review them. Thanks!