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My BottomFeeder Wish List

Jim Robertson asked for suggestions for improvements to the BottomFeeder aggregator. There have been lots of good ideas expressed! Here are a few more:

1. Drop support for Favorites, or make it something useful. I confess that this was my idea originally; it was an attempt to make BF an "Internet Console," supporting a variety of ways to interact with the Internet. Instead, BF has evolved into a high-function aggregator. In any case, Favorites was implemented as a type of pseudo-feed that isn't very useful, instead of being something like the Favorites of M$'s Internet Explorer.
2. Rework the tree structure. Instead of having separate tree roots for Subscriptions, Feedlists and Searches, rework trees as simply a way for users to organize their feeds.
3. Make "subscribed" a user-specifiable property of a feed, rather than something it gets from the folder it is in.
4. Drop Feedlists as a separate kind of object. Instead, allow folders to act as feedlists:
   • Allow a folder to be imported/exported as an OPML file; that is, with items that are just links to feeds.
   • Allow a folder to "subscribe" to a syndicator (eg., Syndic8) so that its list of feeds can be updated more automatically.
   • Allow users to act as syndicators for each other.
5. Handle the pseudo-feeds created by Searches and "Build" commands as dynamic feeds whose contents are defined by a query to a specified server; said query to be executed on-demand or on some schedule.
6. Support tabs for easy navigation to alternate, concurrently available, user-defined views of feeds and their items; for example, one tab to a view of an item in Jim's Blog, a second tab to a newsfeed item, and a third tab to a query feed item.
7. Handle the tree as a separate sub-window that is shown on user-demand (by a toolbar tool), regardless of how the items of a feed are being shown.
8. Better integration of BottomFeeder's documentation into its user interface. Currently there are links to the User's Guide and Tutorial through the Help menu. These links open browser pages to the documents, but users then need to search their Tables of Contents to find specific information. It would be better if the user interface supported context-sensative links to the correct information.