Summary: NewsFlash has a minimalist design, good support for basic functionality, but doesn't support many advanced features you would want in an RSS client. It supports tagging articles, searching by title or content, displaying thumbnails for articles that have images, but it doesn't support nested folders, setting custom update intervals per feed, searching by date, and it only has one layout with three vertical panes and card view. Perhaps if you're using the many online services that NewsFlash integrates with, it could be useful, but otherwise, if you only want a local RSS client, I don't see much reason to use it.
Legend
✅ Positive remark.
⚠️ Caveat or issue.
❌ Missing functionality or critical issue.
Default Feeds
NewsFlash doesn't come with any RSS feeds installed by default, but it does come with the ability to search for feeds online using Feedly.
Adding a Feed
✅ NewsFlash makes it relatively easy to subscribe to RSS feeds.
When you open NewsFlash for the first time, a screen titled "Add RSS Service" shows a list of options for you to choose from. The first, under the heading "This Device," is labelled "Local RSS" and would let you use NewsFlash as a local RSS client.
NewsFlash also supports the ability to synchronize online accounts. Under the heading "Sync Account" you have the options to use the services:
- Fever.
- MiniFlux.
- feedbin.
- Commafeed.
- NewsBlur.
- FreshRSS.
- Inoreader.
- Nextcloud News.
Clicking on Local RSS shows a dialog window labelled "Discover" where you can search for URLs of RSS feeds using an online service called Feedly. The dialog displays eight "Feature Topics." They are: #News, #Tech, #Science, #Culture, #Media, #Sports, #Food, and #Open Source.
⚠️ There's a dropdown list button for selecting the language, but instead of "English" and "German," it reads en_EN and de_DE, which are text codes for the respective languages (German is "Deutsch" in German). I'm not aware of a standard for language codes where en_EN is valid. Normally it's language followed by country code, so you would have en-US and en-GB for example.
⚠️ You can't close this dialog window by clicking outside of it despite it looking like it a dialog you would see in a webpage, but there's a close button on its top-right corner. You aren't obligated to interact with Feedly if you don't want to.
After closing the dialog, you can add an RSS feed by its URL by clicking on the button with a plus (+) icon at the top of the feeds pane at the left. This display a dropdown menu with three options: Feed, Category, and Tag. Clicking on Feed displays a somewhat obnoxiously large dialog window with a single field for the feed's URL. It reads ""Add a feed" "Enter the URL of a feed or website".
After inputting the URL and clicking "Parse," the dialog changes to display a loading icon, and then new options and a back button on its top-left corner.
⚠️ If you click on the back button, the "Parse" button will be disabled until you edit the URL field even through the URL field will already be filled with a valid URL.
⚠️ The new dialog has a field for the feed's title and the category. If you click on the title, you can edit it, but if you click on the category, you can't. There seems to be clear visual indication of this fact. It could be that there should be a pencil icon to the right of the title, but all I see is a grayed triangle with an exclamation mark. Perhaps the icon failed to load because I'm using the flatpak version? No, the dialog clearly says "Add feed" "Edit the title of the feed and set its category" which means it probably only lets you set a category if you already created one, and doesn't let you create a new category as part of the feed addition process.
After you click "Add" the feed is added.
⚠️ Added feeds appear under "Subscriptions" on the left pane, which is an accordion widget: it collapses and expands to display the list of feeds. For some reason it's collapsed by default even though it seems to be the only thing in the left pane, which means right after you add your first feed, you won't be able to see the thing you just added on the window at all, only its articles will appear. The element that indicates the accordion is collapsed is an arrow icon at its right side that points to the left and points downwards only after you interact with it. This is rather confusing and not obvious at all to me because I'm used to simple +/- icons or right arrows on the left side of these things instead.
Web (<link>) Support
✅ NewsFlash supports adding a feed from a webpage URL.
✅ NewsFlash supports webpages that declare multiple RSS feeds, showing a list of feeds for you to select from.
✅ NewsFlash supports typing an invalid URL without scheme or URL path (e.g. only the domain name, www.virtualcuriosities.com instead of https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/).
✅ NewsFlash handles HTTP redirects. A /rss URL responding with 301 PERMANENTLY MOVED declaring /feed/ as its new location is saved as /feed/ instead of as /rss.
⚠️ You can only add one feed at a time, so if you want to add multiple, which to be honest is unlikely, you have to redo this operation for each feed.
✅ NewsFlash uses the phrase "Enter the URL of a feed or website" properly indicating it supports this functionality, and "Multiple Feeds Found."
Custom Automatic Update Intervals
❌ NewsFlash doesn't support specifying the update frequency per RSS feed. It's only possible to specify a global update frequency.
❌ NewsFlash only supports specifying update frequencies under that fit the hh:mm:ss format. In other words, presumably you would only be able to select a frequency of 24 hours or less.
⚠️ NewsFlash lets you input 99:99:99 as update frequency. If you close the settings dialog and open it again, it will show 100:40:39. If you erase this field and type 100:40:39, the field becomes red indicating that it's invalid, even though it was able to store its value just fine.
❌ The default update frequency of NewsFlash is once per 15 minutes, which is a complete waste of bandwidth for most websites since nobody is posting a new article every 15 minutes. Presumably, NewsFlash was designed primarily for syncing with all the online services it supports, and not to function as a local RSS reader.
If an RSS reader saves you the trouble of visiting a webpage to check for new articles, this update frequency would be like if you stayed on the webpage pressing F5 all the time to refresh expecting something new, except you have 50 tabs with sites you care about and every time you press F5 it refreshes all the 50 tabs. Just because you can automate this wasteful behavior that doesn't mean you should.
For reference, you can subscribe to NewsFlash code commits via https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk.atom. Naturally there aren't commits every 15 minutes. The last commit listed in the feed is from 24 days ago. You can set the frequency to 99 hours, 99 minutes, and 99 seconds and not miss anything.
OPML Support
✅ NewsFlash supports importing and exporting OPML outlines, which can be used to transfer RSS feeds from one RSS client to another. To do this, click on the button with a hamburger menu icon button above at the top of the feeds panel and choose "Import" or "Export" in its dropdown menu.
Viewing Articles
✅ NewsFlash displays all articles from all feeds at once when "All Articles" is selected.
✅ NewsFlash has no trouble displaying the content of the articles.
✅ Clicking on an image displays it in full size in a dialog inside NewsFlash.
✅ Clicking on a link opens it in your default web browser.
⚠️ NewsFlash can't load the whole website, however it does have a button in its headerbar with a tooltip that reads "Try to show full content." Clicking on it appears to load the content from the HTML found in the linked page. It seems somewhat reliable, although it's not clear what sort of algorithm it uses. It appears to work both on websites the have an <article> tag and those that don't. Presumably, it loads only content from <p>, <h1-6>, and <figure>. Content written inside of a <div> is ignored. CSS and Javascript isn't loaded, so any custom colors or interactive functionality isn't reproduced. As a website owner, I provide RSS feeds to make it easy for people to visit my website, not to make it easy for them to scrape my articles. If I could blacklist NewsFlash, I would.
✅ NewsFlash supports thumbnails for articles that contain images.
Layouts
❌ NewsFlash only has one layout, with three vertical panes. The articles' list is a card view. No table view alternative.
✅ You can disable thumbnails in preferences.
Managing Feeds
✅ It's possible to move and reorder feeds by drag and drop.
✅ Feeds can be renamed via context menu.
⚠️ It seems you can manually fetch all feeds by clicking on "Refresh Content" at the top of articles pane, but it's not clear whether this fetches one or all feeds.
Folders
⚠️ NewsFlash doesn't support folders. Instead, feeds can be placed into "categories." It's not possible to have sub-folders (sub-categories). A feed can only belong to one category at a time.
Feeds Panel
✅ Feeds have context menus with related actions. Although there are only a few actions.
⚠️ Double-clicking a feed doesn't do anything.
⚠️ Double-clicking a category doesn't collapse/expand it. You must click on the arrow, which this time is on the left side and looks different for some reason.
❌ Doesn't support multiple selection.
Managing Articles
✅ You can change the feed's title.
✅ Articles can be marked as read or unread.
Articles List
⚠️ NewsFlash uses boldness in the title to indicate the status of an article. Bold titles are unread. This isn't easy to notice, and I'd prefer this was indicated via color or icon.
✅ Clicking on an article marks it as read.
Observation: I don't know why RSS and e-mail clients insist on this terminology. Perhaps "seen," "opened," or even "clicked" would make more sense than "read"? I think "unsealed" would sound cool!
✅ Articles appear grouped by date by default, which is nice.
❌ You can't sort articles.
Categories and Tags
✅ NewsFlash supports categories and tags.
✅ You can "star" an article in NewsFlash. Starred articles can easily be filtered in the articles pane.
✅ You can tag articles by clicking on a tag button in the content pane at the right side. A single article may be tagged with multiple tags. The tags appear on the feeds pane, and tagged articles can be filtered by clicking on the tags.
❌ NewsFlash doesn't support setting articles' tags automatically from the categories declared in the RSS feed.
Automation
❌ It's not possible to automatically filter RSS articles on NewsFlash using a keyword, for example, to separate them.
Search
✅ NewsFlash provides basic search functionality.
| Search what? | How? | Supported |
|---|---|---|
| Articles | By title | ✅ Yes. |
| Articles | By content | ✅ Yes. |
| Articles | By author | ❌ No. |
| Articles | By date | ❌ No. |
| Articles | By category | ⚠️ Yes. |
| Articles | By status | ❌ No. |
| Articles | By feed | ⚠️ Yes. |
| Feeds | By title | ❌ No. |
| Snippet | By text | ❌ No. |
⚠️ NewsFlash content search is inconsistent. By default, it will search the content from the RSS feed itself, but if you choose to scrape the article's content from website, it searches the scraped content. There is no way to control this behavior.
⚠️ NewsFlash only searches the selected feed or tag.
❌ There is no way to search the content of the currently display article in NewsFlash. There isn't even a context menu in that area, and pressing Ctrl+F searches articles. Trying to open a scraped article in the web browser to search its text opens the linked article in the web browser which probably won't be helpful if you wanted to keep the scraped content in case the website ever shuts down.
Other Observations
It seems the triangle icon was a missing icon icon, as I found it elsewhere, too. The icon to mark list as read didn't load. The icon that shows as a placeholder when you close an article or no article is opened didn't load.
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