Review: A Little Insight Into SPB Insight

Posted by: dgoldring on Oct 17 2006

 

When is a news reader not a news reader?  That is the question the developers at SPB Software House set out to answer with their latest offering, SPB Insight.  Brought to you by the same people behind multiple award winning programs, such as SPB Pocket Plus and SPB Diary; SPB Insight is more than just an ordinary news reader, it is a multi-faceted news reading tool. 

Installation and Registration:  Installation could not be easier.  Simply download the desktop installer package and run it with your handheld connected via Activesync.  If you have purchased the program, select "Registered Version" and enter your serial number.  If you have not yet purchased the program, select "Trial Version" and a full-featured 15-day trial will be installed on your Pocket PC.

Overview: One reason I rarely use news readers is that they only download a headline or snippet of a story, with a link to the rest of the story.  Now,  I am offline during most of the day.  You can picture this, because I know you have all been there too.  There I am on the train, with no wifi signal in sight.  I pop open my newsreader and see the headline, "Tigers Sweep A’s, Head to the World Series."  I click the story excitedly, only to find a link that reads, "Link to the rest of the story;" and so, I never get to find out "the rest of the story." 

What I really needed was a news reader that could download whole articles, which I could read offline.  Finding such a program, however, proved to be no easy task.  There are various alternatives out there, none of which worked for me.  Some had astronomically sized files, others would freeze during download, and some created a "snapshot" of the whole web site resulting in an image that was so tiny, it created an illegible blur on my screen. 

So, I was stuck using a traditional news reader, and reading only a few sentences offline about each story.  With this general skepticism toward news readers, I started testing SPB Insight.  

In addition to supporting ordinary RSS and Atom feeds, SPB Insight also offers an ingenious new feature which allows you to create "templates" to download the content from virtually any website — without the astronomically sized downloads or the infinitesimally small text — and optimize it for display in SPB Insight.  These templates enable SPB Insight to download the whole article, with pictures rather than just a snippet.

Templates:  Web site templates are the main reason SPB developed Insight and they are, by far, its best feature.  They are designed exactly for people like me.  People who spend a lot of time offline, with little or no wifi access, and no realistic ability to "link here for the rest of the story." 

One nice feature of templates, is that you can make a template for virtually any site on the Internet.  Template creation is not difficult for anyone with a basic understanding of JScript, XML, and HTML programming (which, sadly, I do not possess).  Once created, a template will download the full story (including pictures) from the web site, in a format which is optimized for display on your handheld device.  Read more about creating templates in Netsyd’s article: SPB Insight — SPB’s Newest Great Product.)  

Currently, a template channel can be up to several megabytes in size (depending on how many stories the channel contains).  While this is a much smaller download than some of the programs I tried, it is still considerably larger than the average RSS channel feed.  As a result, it also can take longer to update your channels with SPB Insight, and the downloaded channels may require more storage space, than a traditional news reader.   But I found the result — full articles with pictures — to be well worth it.  Additionally, the size and speed of downloads is an area which should continue to see vast improvements as the program is refined through future releases.

Website: In addition to creating a fantastic new forum for reading all of your favorite website’s offline, SPB Insight has also created an opportunity for an online news reading community.  To do this, they created their own web site, www.spbinsight.com, where users can develop and share templates.  Users of SPB Insight may also post the templates they create in the website’s vast template library, where you can search for and download templates.  This library is a fantastic resource for someone like me, who has virtually no time or ability to create templates on my own.

While the template library is sorted into several general categories, there are quite literally thousands of templates already posted.  Sorting through the library can be a bit overwhelming.  Hopefully, once SPB Insight is released, some more attention can be paid to the website, making searching through the template library a less daunting task.

Interface: SPB’s user interface is intuitive and easy to follow.  The main screen displays a list of your channels in alphabetical order.  It would be nice if this main screen separated channels created with templates from those which are standard RSS feeds (separate categories or tabbed screens).  Frequently, I cannot always remember which channels are which on the main screen.

Selecting a channel takes you to a second screen, which displays a thumbnail of each story in the channel (along with an image if one exists). 

You can then scroll through the stories in the channel (by default they are organized by date with the newest on top) and tap on the one you want to view.  Frankly, it is still amazing to me when I use a channel with a template to see a whole story appear, rather than the typical RSS headline and link.  I cannot emphasize enough how much the template feature in SPB Insight has changed my opinion of using a news reader. 

Additionally, SPB Insight’s templates allow you to see something that most news readers do not offer: pictures to accompany most stories.  This is a great addition and is one of the many reasons SPB Insight stands out among traditional news readers.

Loading new channels: To create a new channel, simply tap the "New" button from the main screen.  You are then presented with several options.  From here, you can select to view SPB’s online template catalogue and download the templates you want to use.  You can also input an ordinary RSS or Atom feed URL to read a standard RSS feed.  Additionally, you can load a stored template or channel, or import an OPML file containing the RSS channels from any other news reader on your device.  As a side note, however, there is currently no option to export your channel data to an OPML file.  This is a fairly standard option, which is useful for archiving, backing up, and storing your channel and template data.  This option should be included in a future release. 

Updating Channels: There are only two options available in SPB Insight for updating your channels.  First, from the menu button, you can select "Update All".  This option will update all of your channels.   You can also do this automatically whenever an internet connection is detected, by selecting this feature from the "Options" screen.  This is a useful tool for those (like me) who can only connect to the Internet infrequently during the day. 

Second, if you only want to update a particular channel, you can open the channel and select "Update" from the menu button (another way to do this is to tap and hold on the channel and select "Update Channel" from the pop up menu.)

At the present time, these are the only options available to update your channels in SPB Insight.  Although this program does a great job of managing channels, more flexibility when updating channels would make it a considerably more effective and user friendly program.

Frequently, I might only have a short period of time in which to connect to the Internet (15 minutes here, or a half hour there).  This is rarely enough time to conduct a full update of all 50 channels I currently have loaded.  However, I do not want to update my channels one at a time.  The ability to do a partial update, or continue an interrupted update where it left off, is an important omission, which needs to be addressed in future releases.

Likewise, SPB Insight lacks the ability to conduct a scheduled update.  This is another important addition.   Frequently, users may prefer to set their news readers to update overnight, for example, and have the news available first thing in the morning.

While the current methods for updating channels in SPB Insight are more than adequate; these additional options would significantly improve the program.  They would allow users considerable flexibility to determine how and when their channels are updated.

Conclusion: SPB Insight offers a bold, new approach to reading the news offline from your handheld device.  If the goal with version 1.0 of this ambitious program, was to create a basic framework for a new generation of news readers, then SPB far exceeded expectations.  Nonetheless, some critics will still look at this program and see only what is missing.  It does not have a today screen plug-in.  It does not play podcasts.  It does not display pictures and images as well as it could.  It should offer more flexible options for updating channels.

These criticisms may all be accurate of version 1.0.  Just as a builder does not start building the house until the foundation is finished, the developers at SPB wisely chose to focus their attention on the basic necessities required by the program.  Instead of trying to keep up with some of the more advanced, but otherwise tangential, features offered by some news readers, SPB looked inward with its initial release, focusing only on what was necessary to the core function of the program.  It would have been a gross injustice to have to wasted their limited resources on any unnecessary features until the basic necessities of the program were completed.

Now that version 1.0 has been released, and the foundation looks exceptionally solid, I would expect SPB to continue to refine the program, while developing optional features for future releases. 

SPB Insight is available at the SPB Insight website.  It costs $19.95, but users can also download a 15-day trial to test it out before purchasing. 

[tags]Spb, Insight, Windows Mobile RSS Readers[/tags] 

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