Yarssr – Panel Applet RSS Reader

By , Published March 1, 2010

Yarssr (Yet Another RSS Reader) is an RSS reader for the GNOME panel.

It displays an icon in the notification area which changes colour to alert you to feed updates. Clicking on the icon give you a drop out menu, clicking the title takes you to the post in your default browser.

The application hasn’t seen much in the way of active development for a while, but that’s in part because it works flawlessly at what it does.

Adding a feed
Launch the application and right click on the tray icon, choosing 'Preferences'.

Click the 'add' button and enter the required details. Then it's simply a case of waiting for updates!

You can also import exported OMPL feed files (E.g. Google Reader) to save time and effort in entering them manually. Note that this is not a direct sync between Google Reader and Yarssr €“ viewing posts in Google Reader won't mark them read in Yarssr.

Icon
On to the fluffier side now and the current icon for Yarssr is this dated little stud: –

No really. Despite the icon has remaining so very 1999 the application itself is a lightweight, ad-hoc and useful way to consume news feeds.

Anyone got any better icons to share?

Download

You'll find Yarssr inside the Ubuntu repositories or you can download it @ yarssr.sourceforge.net

Thanks to reader Mraz

Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk

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  • Anonymous

    I made icons for the Adobe AIR app “Snackr”. I think it would look better than the Yarssr icon, and fit perfect in your tray. I think all you have to do is rename the icons, of course.

    Here’s the link:

    http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Snackr+icon+for+elementary+theme?content=120850

    Enjoy!

    Peace!

  • Anonymous

    I’m going to call you the icon crusader.

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      OMG! ICONS!

      • Anonymous

        In case you ever have to rename the blog, that might work.

  • Anonymous

    Is there a Desktop-RSS-Reader that has direct sync between Google Reader and the desktop application?

  • Mohan

    Interesting, I use Liferea which works well and it’s lightweight. So does this one open the stories in the default browser?

    • Mraz

      Yes sir it has the option to open the feed in gnome default or the browser of your choice.
      I like liferea as well but this is a lot more unobtrusive.

    • Anonymous

      Humm. I use Lifera as well, but am not finding it really lightweight…It takes ages to load up, and has crashed on me once or twice. But I am still happy with the piece of software. It is very good indeed, but does your flash work in the embedded browser of Liefera?

      The word lightwight for YARSSR has caught my attention, and I shall try it out

      • Mohan

        Mine loads up very fast. Do you have a lot of feeds? Yes flash does work with mine in the embedded browser. What version are you running? Mine is 1.6.0.

        • Anonymous

          Thanks for the swift answer :)

          YEs I am also on version 1.6.0, but as you say it might be because I have several feeds. Altogether, there are 12 feed sources, of which some are spewing out 10 /12 feeds a day, so it must weigh down on the system…

          I enabled the option Flash in the browser, but it does not seem to work. I hesitate to invest myself in this a lot if I am going to have a different RSS reader in Lucid (Can’t wait)

          • Mohan

            I have way more than 12, but the are in folders…hmmm I wonder why yours is slow that is odd.

          • Anonymous

            OK, so the flash must have been fixed in the last version, it works flawlessly in a tab inside Lifera.
            Lifera is just slow when fetching feeds, actually brings the computer to a standstill for a few seconds, other than that it behaves itself quite well

        • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

          My dalliances with liferea have always been on the slow side. It’s les crashy that its used to be. (I used to be quite rude about this and say that the name of the app was missing a ‘d’ because users could never read a full article before it crashed xD)

          I do have tons of feeds (i have my syncing with GReader) and i think that may be the issue. When it’s fetching feeds it grinds my pc to a stop.

          • Mohan

            Is there way to sync up Liferea with Google Reader? I though that was proposed in 1.7, as I would love to have that feature now.

          • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

            File > New Source > Google Reader

          • Mohan

            Oh dang, I been waiting for that for months and it was right under my nose, thanks man!

  • Anonymous

    I made some icons for yassr! :)

    Here’s a screenshot

    http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/3203/screenshot5s.png

    and here’s a link to them

    http://www.sendspace.com/file/5gc0se

    put the .png files into /usr/share/yarssr/pixmaps

    and replace the .pl file in /usr/share/yarssr/Yarssr with the one I modified to use the PNG files.

    Hope you like em!

    • http://kroulee.com Brandon Sheppard

      How’d you get it to stop colouring the background of the png icons grey? I tried to do something similar but when I did, all the icons had an ugly grey background.

      • Anonymous

        I’m not too sure what you’re talking about. I just set the background layer opacity to 0%.

        The picture is 2 layers. The bottom is a transparent layer. The top is just text. (I’m sure you already knew this though.)

        Btw, what’d you think of them?

        • http://kroulee.com Brandon Sheppard

          Very nice actually, works well with the humanity icons. I’ll post mine up soon.
          I was getting a weird bug where it wouldn’t accept transparency on PNG’s but I think it’s working now. Weird. lol.
          edit: To clarify, it wasn’t the image file or anything, just when the icon was on the panel it had a border.

          • Anonymous

            That’s really strange. Good to hear you got it fixed though.

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      They are stunning! ^_^

      • Anonymous

        Thank you! :)

  • Mraz

    Awesome! Thanks for posting it dOod. I knew Icons would show up as soon as you wrote something. Keep up the OMG! awesome! blog its the best.

  • bhm

    http://www.iconspedia.com/search/rss/
    I guess this’ll be the best place to start ;).

  • davdalx

    They should really hook up a ‘online’ indicator. Like the one in windows in the network icon that shows a little earth icon when it’s detected an internet connection.

  • kok

    “GrNotify” is similar tray app, small and lightweight, that actually does sync with Google Reader.

  • kok

    “GrNotify” is similar tray app, small and lightweight, that actually does sync with Google Reader.

  • ABBAS ALI

    is it works with unity interface in natty?