Review: Spb Insight - Spb’s newest great product

Posted by: Brandon Steili on Oct 17 2006

Welcome the newest addition to the family of products from Spb - Insight!

For many of us, staying on top of what is happenning throughout the country or the world is one of the most important things we do on a daily basis. The world changes by the minute and staying up to date with those changes can be a full time job if you don’t have a simple (and inexpensive) way to stay on top of things. Now, you could easily sit down in front of the TV and watch CNN or FOX or BBC all day long and you would know everything about what’s happening… but how boring would that be?

Enter programs like NewsBreak, Egress and the newest addition Spb Insight. Programs like Insight allow us to get up off the couch and get moving. There’s a million things to do in a day, but fortunately there’s little breaks of time between these tasks, and for me this is where news/RSS/website download apps shine. I personally catch up on the news at my daughter’s soccer practice, and when I have a few spare minutes between the honey-do list. (yea .. I call it Football too, but I didn’t want to confuse anyone) —  Here’s the "Press Release" - Read the review after the break for more - pardon the pun - Insight into Insight.

Spb Insight is a news reading application that gives rich offline experience along with easy interface and full RSS/Atom support. With Spb Insight you’ll always have all the latest information, fit in your pocket, with images and whole article texts, optimized for small screen viewing. In addition to RSS/Atom channels support, Spb Insight introduces new "template-based" channels, which provide more flexibility to readers and allow downloading of full article text with pictures instead of a short passage usual to RSS. This technology allows you to update all the channels using free and fast internet connection (generally at work or at home), and then read all the articles containing pictures and texts optimized for a small screen, with visiting an original site not being required. Any user of Spb Insight can create his/her own template (small XML/JScript file) to download and optimize content from any public web sites. The technology is mainly aimed at news sites processing, yet it’s still possible to handle other web sites including tv schedules, online shops, comixes, weather forecasts, etc. Most popular templates and RSS/Atom channels will be hosted on Spb Insight Online Catalog, which is accessible from our web site http://www.spbinsight.com and the program itself, which makes choosing interesting channels quite easy. Currently there are more than a thousand channels in Online Catalog and it grows rapidly! Here is a list of major features of Spb Insight 1.0: * Full website news using "template-based" channels * Full RSS/Atom support (RSS 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0; Atom 0.3, 1.0) * Offline reading with pictures * Easy to use interface * One hand operation * Article thumbnails * No desktop component needed * Many other features!

 

Sorry about the long first page post … but I wanted to get all of the info there before the break. Studies show most people hate the break (ok, there’s not studies but I’m sure most people do.) 

Anyway back onto the review -

What is Insight?

Spb insight is a nice mix of everything you would want from a Pocket PC newsreader without all the things you don’t really want. It’s not 100% fit and finish like an application you would expect from Fizz software, but it’s not as "function over form" as a Palm app would be… Insight is a great product right out of the box. Granted being a new application it has a bug or two that people will discover that didn’t show up in the beta groups, but it also has some things that the long running applications don’t have and honestly may never have. So, I’d call Spb Insight a "newsreader", but it really isn’t just a news reader - it’s more of a web-reader. I see I just lost a couple people. Yes, I said web-reader which isn’t something we typically see from a PPC application. Insight uses something much different from your average RSS reader on PPC’s - something called a "template".

What is a template?

01 ?xml version="1.0"?
02 template version="1.0"
03      channel

Well … you get the idea. A template in Spb’s Insight is code written basically as JScript and XML that parses an active web page and breaks it out into a simple page designed for the device. Think of it as parsing a webpage and taking out the bits that matter and then tossing the bits that don’t. Granted this is very similar to what RSS was designed to do for us, but if the site does not employ an RSS feed for you … that’s where you’d want to use a template. Now, I’m no programmer. I can script (VBScript) but XML and JScript have not made it into my vocabulary yet. So what’s a user to do when they don’t have a clue? No worries. Spb has created an online catalog of Templates (and RSS Feeds) that you can start using right away without any help. Simply click on the "new" menu button and then click Next. Couldn’t be easier. (Oh, and you can easily add your own to the channels by just chosing that option.)

As of this writing, I believe I saw about 900 sites in the catalog. Trust me you DO NOT want to add them all!!! Adding a new feed is simple. As you can see in the screenshot below, all you need to do is click the checkbox for the feed/template you want (templates are blue) and click finish … wala!

So what else is there that can be done?

Reading the news

So, I ask you … what’s the biggest complain most of us have about the "top" news readers? What’s the thing we want most? See below for the answer:

Yup - Pictures. OFFLINE pictures!!! And what makes pictures so important? Well, a lot of things, but for those of us in love with mobile devices, pictures are the only way to see what’s hot. Now, the other cool thing about Insight is the pictures aren’t only available inside the article. Which means you can easily come back to identfy certain articles even if you can’t remember what the title was.

The Main Page

Ok… I’m almost done with the screenshots, because the only way to really love a program is for you to try it yourself. So, without further ado - the most important page of the application:

Now, you’ll notice this image is a lot larger than the rest. Why? Well, this is one of the most important pages and you need to know what’s really going on here. Let’s start at the top. See the little checkmark on the CNN icon? That little checkmark has a purpose, and that purpose is to tell you the status of the update for that channel. What the icons mean:

• Checkmark - channel has completed uploading
• Exclamation point - There was an error downloading the updates. This could be a single news item or the entire feed.
• Orange - this feed is queued to be downloaded
• Little down arrow (not pictured) - this is the current channel being updated.
• Progress bar - NOT the entire progress. Just the progress of the current channel.

Wrapping it up

Alright… time to call this a day. Why? Deal or No Deal is coming on. Seriously it is (TiVo).

So, let’s close this up with some thoughts. I love this application. I own Newsbreak, Egress and used A6.Times for quite a while and I’m going to keep using Insight. Why? It works and it’s very, very simple. A little bit better reason? Images. Newsbreak doesn’t do offline images and that was my biggest complaint. Second reason? Templates & the online catalog. I love that end users can add their own templates and get them into the catalog. I love that I can get non-rss feed sites on my mobile.

What I don’t like? This app isn’t quite yet "converged" friendly. What’s that mean? Well, it is a big of a space hog (but with images what do you expect) — it can be loaded in an expansion slot card and be happy so space isn’t that big of a problem AND it doesn’t auto-update yet. It will stay up-to-date in a dock, but I haven’t used a dock on my 8125 in who knows how long. I do know that Spb is still developing and the release product is far from feature complete. They are planning updates (speed improvement, today plugin, and possibly others…) so bear that in mind if you think something is missing.

Why not go give it try … Spb Insight

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

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