I’m still on the quest for a good RSS reader for my T-Mobile Wing. Ideally it would be free and open source, but open source Pocket PC software seems few and far between.

Why aren’t more Pocket PC applications designed for finger based operation? The stylus is a huge time-waster.

I tried PocketRSS, but discovered that despite the fact that I didn’t think it was running at all, it had consumed 850+ MB of my storage card’s space! I have no idea how that happened, but I wasn’t having any of that for such clunky software. It was summarily uninstalled.

Next up, I decided to try Egress, by Egress. Its not open source, or even free, but it looked attractive enough on the website.

On first startup, I got an error message that \My Documents\Channels cannot be found. The dialog is not intuitive, but I clicked “No”, and tried to select “\Storage Card\My Documents\Channels”. For some reason, the same dialog popped up twice, so I had to select the same directory a second time. Also, while in the channel storage location selection dialog, the dynamic buttons at the bottom of the screen said “Home” and “Tools” but clicking them didn’t do anything. I found this problem repeated in many places through out the program.

Once installed, I got started downloading feeds and trying to actually read them. I liked the display, the formatting, and the colors, all of which were pleasing and easy to get used to. One thing which I found irritating was that the current article was always “opened” for reading. I would prefer to select a feed, press the right arrow to see a list of articles, and then press right again to see the text of the selected article. Up and down would cycle articles, left would go back to the articles, and left again, back to the list of feeds. You can close the currently open article by tapping it, but as soon as you press up or down to select the next article, that one opens. Also confusing is that while tapping the article opens and closes it, “clicking” with the center button on your navigation controls opens the article in your web browser.

If your a stylus person, you can scroll through the list of articles with the scroll bar on the side, but I try and do as much as possible without the stylus.

Egress does offer OMPL import, Podcast downloading, and a bunch of other features which all looked useful, though I haven’t tried them, and doubt I’ll get to it.

Overall, I thick I can recommend at least trying Egress, you might find its flow suits you, especially if you use the stylus.