Pears

Info

Pears is a three-pane newsfeed (RSS/RDF/Atom) aggregator. It has a clean, uncluttered interface, it's easy to use and works on Windows, Linux and MacOSX.
It has the following features:
  • caching of downloaded items, with cache size configurable per feed
  • support for Atom feeds new
  • plugin support: plugins can be either one per file, or in the form of plugin collections (several plugins in a single file) new
  • read/unread management and deletion capabilities on a per feed, per topic or overall basis
  • support for non-western encodings
  • automatic and quite frequent saving of downloaded data so hopefully nothing will ever be lost
  • auto-updating feeds is possible, with the update interval configurable per feed
  • capable of showing differences between original and updated items
  • shortcut key access to most functions, but also mouse-driven operation (right-click to update a feed, right-click to toggle read/unread status for a topic in a feed) and automatic read/unread toggling
  • stores everything in plain text (as Python data structures, no registry use under Windows)
  • quite good performance (on my Athlon XP 2000+/512Mb it has no problems handling my 2.5 Mb test file - the equivalent of about 100 quite large feeds or some 500 small ones). Using HAMSTERMODE (see the Q&A on how to switch it on), Pears can handle even much, much larger numbers without any performance problems.
  • all options and downloaded data are stored on a per-user basis. In other words, it should be enough to install one copy of Pears on a computer and have that copy be used by different users with different preferences and feeds.
  • compact and small: you can even run it from e.g. your USB stick
  • OPML support (importing or exporting feeds)
  • just generally well behaved, both offline and online (e.g. it doesn't pollute your Windows registry and it supports bandwidth saving techniques)
  • no ads, no nags, free and open source (GPL)

Installing and uninstalling

Pears comes in a tarball (all platforms) and as a setup (Windows only). Unpack it with an archiver respectively install it to some directory. The program will create in each users's home directory a folder called .pears. If you don't know where the home directory is, look in the About window of Pears, which contains the location of the data directory.
Make sure you have Python and wxPython installed as well, or Pears won't run at all.

Uninstalling is just as easy: remove the folder where you installed Pears (if you forgot where that is, use the About screen). You can also remove the .pears folders in the home directories of all users who have had access to Pears. Pears does not use anything outside its own directory and the home directory (not even the registry under Windows).

Requirements

Pears should work on any computer where Python and wxPython can run. I use it on a day-to-day basis on Windows XP and I've done some rudimentary testing on my Mandrake 9.1 and 10.0CE, but as far as I know there is no OS-specific code in it so it should work quite ok on Windows 9x/ME/NT/XP as well as all Linux flavours, OS X and possibly some exotic systems.

If your operating system does not come with Python installed (Linux distro's usually do include Python, but Windows systems don't) or you have an old version like the ones delivered by RedHat in releases below 8.0, you can get a Python distribution for your operating system at Python.org. I think Pears should work with any version starting with 2.2, but I have only tested on 2.3.2.

wxPython is available from wxPython.org. I develop/test with wxPython 2.5.1.5 unicode.

The documentation is only properly displayed on reasonably modern browsers which support CSS.

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Contact

Please use the facilities on the Sourceforge page to submit bug reports, patches and such.
E-mail/MSN: project5@wanadoo.nl
ICQ: 84243714
Jabber: project5@rhymbox.com
Web: http://project5.tk or http://come.to/project5

Licence

Pears is distributed under the GPL.
© 2003, 2004 Project 5