NewsGator timeline view

I’m usually not one to just post other people’s stuff verbatim, but this post from Mark Gardner is just too cool for words:

Interesting NewsGator trick: Put all or most of your feeds into one Outlook folder, and give it a timeline view filtering out read items. What you get is a scrollable “space” containing a mixed variety of news items — scroll left and right to move around in time, and up and down to view posts within that window of time.

detail of NewsGator timeline view

I find this helps me catch up on a variety of sites that I might otherwise miss from having to drill down to individual feeds, or having to scroll down through the entirety of a feed’s updates just to get to the next one. When they’re jumbled like this, yet still organized by time, I can quickly scan through looking for the latest interesting stuff.

Most other news aggregators I’ve tried don’t have the flexibility of views that Outlook+NewsGator offers. It’s true you could use a simple table view to get the now-ubiquitous three-paned interface, but that just doesn’t cut it when you start subscribing to hundreds of feeds at a time.

I love it when people show me ways to use NewsGator that I haven’t seen before. Thanks Mark!

3 Comments

3 thoughts on “NewsGator timeline view”

  2. Kenneth LeFebvre

    Using Outlook 2003, you can create a Search Folder that combines all of your individual feed folders into one “virtual folder” which you can assign a default view of the Timeline. That way, you can still have your feeds go into separate folders for more casual browsing, and yet use this excellent approach to catching up on a chronological basis.

    Thanks, Mark, for the great idea! Thanks, Greg, for a great product!

    Reply ↓
  3. Mark Gardner

    My company is only now going through the forced-march upgrade from NT4+Office2K to XP+Office2K2/XP. I don’t expect an upgrade to Office 2003 until at least next year, possibly the one after that.

    Still, search folders sound spiffy. It’d be nice if they were in the operating system, though, like BeOS’ query folders. I understand Windows Longhorn is incorporating a database-like filesystem to enable such things.

    Reply ↓

Leave a Reply