In addition to its full text searches, saved searches, notifications and filters,[5]RSSOwl v2.1 synchronized with the now discontinued Google Reader.[6][7]
History
RSSOwl began as small project on SourceForge at the end of July 2003.[8] The first public version was 0.3a.
Version 1.0
RSSOwl 1.0 was released on December 19, 2001. It was released with support for RSS and Atom news feeds. The initial release also supported exporting feeds to PDF, RTF, and HTML. This release was available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris.
RSSOwl 1.1 added support for toolbars and quick search in news feeds.[9] Version 1.2 improved toolbar customization and added support for Atom 1.0 News feeds.[10] Versions 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 added universal binary support for the Mac as well as drag and drop for tabs and a built-in feed validator.[11][12] RSSOwl was the SourceForge Project of the Month for January 2005.[13]
Version 2.0
RSSOwl 2.0 was announced on March 7, 2007, at EclipseCon 2007.[14] Version 2.0 was rebuilt on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and used db4o for database storage and Lucene for text searching.[15] Several milestone versions were released before the final 2.0 version that added labeling of news feeds, pop-up notification of new feeds and storage of news articles in news bins.[16][17] The final 2.0 version was released as milestone 9 and added support for secure password and credential storage, news filters, support for embedding Firefox 3.0 XULRunner to render news feeds, and proxy support for Windows.[18] Version 2.1, released July 15, 2011, added Google Reader synchronization support and new layouts.[6][7]
Forks
RSSOwl is no longer maintained [19] by its original developer. However, a maintained fork of it is available, known as RSSOwlnix.
Features
Format support
Full support for RSS & RDF versions 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0
Import and Export favorite newsfeeds using OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language)[20]
Import and Export your settings in RSS Owl to use them on another computer
Other
Support for podcast downloading using news filters
Integrated Newsfeed validator
Erroneous favorites are marked
Read news either in the internal browser or a Rich Text window[21]
Blog news viewed in RSS Owl with your favorite blogging tool
Huge list of sample Newsfeeds pre-saved
Select an auto-update-interval for your favorites
View properties of a selected favorite
Internationalization
RSSOwl has been translated into many languages, including Bengali, Bulgarian, Czech, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Ukrainian.