 When it comes to finding news, I'm very much a old school type of guy. I would probably prefer a newspaper if those things still existed, but they really don't. So when I talk old school, I'm really talking about RSS feeds, and probably the vast majority of the kids who were born in the last 15 years probably don't even know what an RSS feed is, or if they do, they've never actually used one. But back in the day, when we wanted to get a large amount of news in one place, in an application that we pretty much controlled, we switched to RSS, and it was amazing, the golden age of getting news from multiple sources all in one place. It was spectacular. Unfortunately, RSS is kind of fallen by the wayside. However, it does still exist in almost every website that you visit can be turned into an RSS feed, if one is not already provided to you. And RSS remains one of the best ways to get news in my opinion. So when I find a RSS feed reader that I've never actually tried before, well, I thought I'd take a look at it. So today I'm going to be taking a look at an application called News Flash. Now, I think I have actually heard of News Flash vaguely in the past, but I've never actually tried it. So I downloaded it, and I've been playing around with it now for a little while. And so far, my impressions are pretty good. So let me show you what News Flash actually looks like. So this is News Flash, it is a GTK for based application now. And basically what that means is that it will work really well in GNOME and it has a responsive design. So if I were to move this into floating mode here and then resize it, it would resize so that it looks more like a mobile phone application, not that big of a deal if you don't actually use Linux on mobile. But if you do, that's kind of cool, right? Outside of that, the overall look and feel of it is actually really nice. It does look like a GNOME application, but if that's okay with you, which is it is okay with me, it looks pretty nice. It has along the side all of your categories, which you can create on your own. So these are things that I've created, you can name them whatever you want. And that allows you if you have multiple sources, you can be more organized about it, you don't just put them all in one category. One of the things that I would like to see is being able to just update that one category, which doesn't appear to be possible, but that's not that big of a deal. You can honestly just click into a source, hit the refresh button, or hit the refresh shortcut key, and it will refresh for you. In addition to all of that, it does have the normal stuff you'd expect from a GUI RSS reader. So things like being able to star articles, things like being able to open an article in a browser, things like that. You can also add tags up here at the top if you want to. And one of the really neat things is that by default, it tries to get the entire article, which is something that is fairly rare when it comes to RSS feed readers, usually when you send up to an RSS feed, and you pull it down, you're only going to get the first 10 lines of some of the article or something like that, because the website actually wants you to go to their website to view the content with newsflash. There's this button up here that's automatically and it gets you the entire article, or at least it's from what I can tell, it gets you the entire article. And that includes things like embedded tweets, embedded videos. There's one down here in the on the verge here that had an embedded video. And all that stuff shows up, which is really nice. And that's not something that would happen in a normal RSS feed. Probably the whole truncating RSS feed articles is the reason why RSS isn't used all that much anymore. But for the people who still use it, we've found ways of getting around it. And this is a neat one. In terms of adding feeds, you can do so in many different ways, you can add feeds from a specific URL by hitting the plus button, or you can hit this discover feeds and it'll get bring you to this window here, where you can kind of search through the available RSS feeds that they've already curated for you. So in terms of tech, they have things like tech radar, tech crunch, tech spot, and even things from Reddit, which is kind of cool. And obviously, there are other categories other than just tech, so that they have sports media food, things like that. And there are also feature topics available in German as well. So that's the only other languages I've seen that the support. So if you're speaking something else, you're kind of out of luck in that case. One thing that is also cool about this is that it supports several RSS services. So I'm going to put up a picture of the beginning screen here. And basically, there are several RSS feed services out there that basically allow you to put all of your RSS feeds into that service. And then you can take them from device to device to different applications. And they all kind of sync up together. So you can sync through like the red and unread status and things like that. And if you use one of those services, it's nice that this application supports them in terms of preferences, there are a few. Now this is not the most well designed preferences that there's a lot of text here that I don't necessarily think is all that well designed, but it does the job. So it allows you to only show relevant items, how you sort the feed as well, you can choose how the article is portrayed. So there's a grub box version, so you can have a dark mode with grub box, which is really cool. Those are really the only five themes that it comes with. Surprisingly, only two dark themes and three light themes, which is a little weird, but whatever, you can also change the content with the line width. And whether or not it uses the system font, in terms of the application, you can choose whether to keep it running, whether it syncs on startup, whether it syncs on meter, meter connection. So like a mobile phone meter connection, something like that, you can change the update interval interval, and you can see how much data it has used. So this is very much also designed for mobile in mind. One of the things that I really like about it is that it does have key bindings. So if you go up to the hamburger button up here and click on shortcuts, it'll show you all the shortcuts, but you're not stuck with these. If you want to change them, you can do so in the preferences by going to the key bindings thing, then you can change any one of these, which is actually not all that common amongst GUI feed readers. A lot of them are kind of like hard coded in terms of key bindings if they have key bindings at all. Now, obviously, if you're using a TUI or a terminal based RSS feed reader, you have a lot more control usually. So if you're using like news boat or something like that, you probably have even more control over the key bindings than what you would get here in newsflash, but it's still nice to see that here. There's also a search box here. So if you want to search through the settings, which is nice, now, I don't think that that's even really all that necessary, because there's not that much many settings, but it's nice that they thought about it. Overall, the experience is actually really good. So if you navigate around to different articles and stuff like that, you have a really good experience. It seems to function really well, it's fast. It has the different themes, it follows the system theme. So you can see here, it's actually using the dark theme, which is what I have it set for. And it's a flat pack. So because this is a flat pack, I thought that the theme just wouldn't kind of be applied automatically, but it worked really well. So that was nice. I haven't had any problems with images and stuff like that, not appearing. And the whole idea of being able to read the entire article right here inside newsflash is actually really nice. The all articles feed, which is up here just kind of combines all of your categories and sources together, which is a great way to actually go through the news. So if you have a whole bunch of sources, you can just click right through one to the other. And you can use the them keys to navigate between the different articles. Now, the one thing that I have noticed is that there doesn't seem to be a way to get more articles, if the site itself limits the numbers of articles you can actually get to. So in the case of the verge here, it looks like we're limited to eight articles completely. And I see no way of getting more. So I'm assuming that that's based on how the RSS feed functions, and not how the application functions itself. So that's not that big of a deal. It's just something that I noticed. I don't know if that's something that is going to pervasive amongst other RSS feeds. I haven't really noticed that in other RSS apps, but then it's possible that I wouldn't because I just focused on the new articles as they come in anyways. So that is newsflash. It is a simple little application that allows you to view your articles via RSS. And it's really, really nice. I actually kind of prefer it over news about, which is what I usually use, mainly because of the ability to kind of see pictures and stuff like that. It's not something that you can really do in news about that easily. So the fact that a lot of the videos and images are stuff right embedded in the articles is actually really nice. Now I know that RSS doesn't apply or appeal to everybody. So I would actually recommend to a lot of people to give this a try because if you've never tried getting your new stuff via RSS, it's a really good experience because while a lot of times you do still end up having to go to the website to get to the full content, it's a nice way of kind of choosing what you want to read instead of having to go to one website after another and only reading like one article, you know, you get all your stuff here in your daily feed, choose what you want to read. And then if you do have to go to the website to view the article, that's not that big of a deal. You not wasted any time anyways. So I prefer RSS for most of my news reading shenanigans. So I highly recommend people give it a try. So that's newsflash. If you have comments on this, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast, you can follow me on mass center. Honestly, those links will be in the video description. 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