As you might have heard, Windows 8 is around the corner. I went ahead and did a test how RSSOwl works on this new OS. As you can see from the screenshot below, thanks to the native UI library RSSOwl is using, the app adapts to the new theme easily:

This bugfix release resolves an issue when synchronizing articles to Google Reader and receiving an error "Bad Request (400)". This could happen when RSSOwl synchronized several hundred articles in one chunk to Google. As such this issue was only showing up for power users. If you have never seen this problem, you can stay on 2.1.2.

To reactivate this blog, I am going to post a tour around RSSOwl features in the upcoming weeks. For power users these posts are likely no news, but it will certainly help newcomers to get the most out of RSSOwl.

Today I would like to emphasize the fact that since RSSOwl is running with Java, you can use RSSOwl on Windows, Mac and Linux. On top of that, RSSOwl is available in nine languages that you can install through plug-ins from the tools menu.

Check out our FAQ for some general tips and tricks while using RSSOwl and come back next week for another feature guide.

Since RSSOwl 2.1 you can synchronize your entire list of subscriptions with a Google Reader account. One of the less obvious advantages of doing so is being able to download an unlimited number of news from any feed you are subscribed to, even if the news is old enough to no longer be part of the feed. This is because Google stores all news of the feeds you are subscribed to on their servers and RSSOwl can access them directly from Google.

To configure this, simply set the number of news to keep per feed (Properties | Clean Up | Maximum number of news to keep) to a high value (up to 1000) and RSSOwl will download all news until the limit is reached. Similar, even when you are on vacation for some weeks, as soon as RSSOwl loads the feed after you are back, you will not loose any article.

More advantages of using Google Reader synchronization can be found in our FAQ.

Nice to see this story from lifehacker naming RSSOwl the best news reader for Linux.

We think more people should know about RSSOwl. If you are the maintainer of a website or know someone that is, you can do us a favour and add one of our promotional buttons to your website, e.g.:



You can find instructions on our Contribute page. Thanks in advance!

RSSOwl is based on a platform that can easily be extended with additional functionality. We provide some add-ons that are worth mentioning here. If you open Tools | Add-ons | Find Add-ons you see a list of available add-ons for your platform. The most popular one is likely the Newsgroup reader that turns RSSOwl into a nntp-client (find out more here). Another useful add-on that was recently added is the Offline Mode that allows to stop all network access from RSSOwl as long as the offline mode is active.

With the same mechanism, you can even install additional languages into RSSOwl. Find the list of additional languages from Tools | Language | Download Additional Languages.