Radio UserLand vs. Amphetadesk

Comparative review of two RSS Aggregators: Radio UserLand and Amphetadesk.

First off: I am a Radio user, and a happy one. Before I started using Radio, I tried some other aggregators, and one of those was Amphetadesk. It’s very similar to Radio, so I think a comparison would be nice.

Both Radio UserLand and Amphetadesk are One Page Aggregators. That means all the content is shown on one page, instead of using a mail client alike layout. Suppose you’re subscribed to three feeds, and they all have 10 items. Both Radio and Amphetadesk will give you 30 items when you first view the page. With Radio, you have the option of deleting items you’ve read. When you view the aggregator page an hour later, and none of the three feeds has updated in the meantime, you will have an empty page. Amphetadesk will just keep on showing those 30 items.
Another difference between the two, very related to what I mentioned above: the way items are grouped. When a feed updates, and you’ve already read items from that feed earlier, you only need to see the new items, right? Radio knows that, and keeps track of items it has already showed. That way, when you visit the news page, you'll only see new items at the top. If you hadn't deleted the older items earlier, those will be below the new items. Not necessarily right below them, but maybe with new items from other news sources in between them. Radio groups items in two ways: first it orders by arrival time (the time the feed was read), second it orders by source.

When I used Amphetadesk, it had some bugs. Sometimes new stories within a feed didn't get downloaded, so you would miss content. Sometimes it did download those stories, placing them at the bottom of the page, which just doesn't make any sense. Sometimes, the contents of a feed get placed at the top of the page, while nothing has changed since the last time you looked. Doesn't make sense either.

Both Amphetadesk and Radio have a built-in webserver running, which makes it easy to subscribe to a feed using the white-on-orange XML/coffee mug icon. Amphetadesk is able to listen on port 5335 when you're not a Radio user, so that eases subscribing to feeds a lot.

They also both offer the opportunity to tweak the layout of the news page a bit. With Amphetadesk, you can dig into the Perl code to change everything. With Radio, there's two steps in doing this. First, you can choose templates for the entire Desktop Website (to which the News page belongs). Second, if you're familiar with UserTalk, you can edit the raw code that's processed every time you view the page. Those changes are more difficult, and when Radio updates, you lose those changes as it's UserLand's own code.

Radio supports OPML for importing feeds, Amphetadesk doesn't seem to. Radio is (now in beta, soon officially released) supporting Atom feeds, Amphetadesk doesn't.

Amphetadesk is free software, or rather: donationware. You have the option of donating some money to the creator. Radio UserLand, which has a 30-day trial period, costs $39,95. That might be a lot of money for an aggregator, except for the fact that a complete weblog management tool is included, als well as a scripting environment in which you can do very cool stuff, if you're into scripting. In short: you're paying for more than just an aggregator. If you don't want that, you might consider not choosing Radio.

To summarize this comparison: Amphetadesk is okay, but it's got some strange behaviours and misses some features. I would consider Amphetadesk a failed Radio UserLand clone. Radio is much better, and still being maintained, where Amphetadesk's last update dates from 2002.

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