After testing a modification of Canola's feedhandler on Fremantle and having qgil report that it works, I plan to create a more useful, self-contained "feedhandler" package that all RSS-related apps can depend on and automatically get their apps to appear in a menu when clicking on the RSS button in the browser.

The current test app looks roughly like this:



(Clicking on the RSS icon in the web browser brings up this window which will allow the user to choose which feed reader to pass the feed to. The UI needs some more work, and the entries are currently static.)

A quick research (related threads: here and here) revealed the following existing apps:

• Feed Circuit by George Kibardin
• Nibbles by Mark Somerville
• Google Reader (web-based) - Maybe others, too?
• CloudReader - no source/binaries available?
• Canola by INdT
• gPodder by yours truly
• Penguin TV by Owen Williams
• RSS Feed Reader (the built-in one)

Do you know of any other feed readers that you use and are not listed here? I'd like to get some input on how to interface with other apps. Ideally, it would be good if every feed reader could provide a command-line "subscribe" tool that gets one parameter (the URL) and launches the feed reader (if it's not running already) and passes the URL to it and presents the user with a "subscribe" dialog.

Then, every feed reader could depend on this "feedhandler" package and install a description file in some agreed-upon location that will contain the name of the feed reader and the binary that's to be used to subscribe to URLs. The feedhandler can then load and parse all subscription files and display a menu like the one in the screenshot with all installed feed readers.

At least Nibbles describes how to do this manually on its home page, and obviously Canola has this in the canola-tuning package (sadly it does not allow other readers to integrate into the feed handler and it drags in lots of canola dependencies, that's why I decided to create a separate feed handler).

The resulting feedhandler package and integration works at least on Chinook, Diablo and Fremantle, maybe even on older versions.

Does this sound like a good idea? Is the way of interfacing with the RSS applications (agreed-upon location to install a description file + command-line "subscribe" utility) a good idea or are there better ideas? Is subscribing to feeds with web apps useful or unnecessary?