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Welcome back everyone to our third installment of the Feed Reader Friday series, where we are introducing the various feed reading options available to BlackBerry owners. If you have not been keeping up, please take a minute to check out our reviews of the FreeNews reader and NewsGator Go applications.

This week we present to you the Viigo RSS Reader.

The Viigo RSS reader can be downloaded here. You will be given the option of sending the link to your BlackBerry via email or SMS.

First impressions of Viigo Personal

Viigo is a BlackBerry application that allows you view categorized feeds for just about any subject. Additionally, you can add in RSS feeds from any web site that makes one available to its visitors.

The Viigo RSS reader delivers content in a fast and flawless manner. What seperates Viigo from the pack is that it is not only able to collect and display RSS feeds, but also has the ability to display content from blogs and traditional websites alike.

The Viigo RSS reader comes packed with a huge amount of content to get you started. This can be looked at as either a gift or a curse. For those who are new to the whole RSS phenomenon it is quite handy to have a good amount of content available to work through on the way to feeling comfortable with the application. On the other hand, for those more experienced with RSS and the consumption of news in feed format, this value added content just gets in the way. For the experienced users, you are in for a little bit of work to clean up the app and get it ready for “your feeds”.

Features and Functionality

Local Events: The Viigo RSS reader makes it easy to keep tabs on local events happening in and around where you live. Keep track of theater dates, special interests groups, music events and more with a few simple clicks.

Local Weather: If keeping track of the local weather forecast is high on the list of your list of priorities, Viigo will help you keep one step ahead. You will never get caught in the rain again without an umbrella.

News: Getting headlines from all over the world as events unfold is quick and easy with the Viigo RSS reader. News items are delivered directly to you no matter where you are.

Sports: Get the latest scores and news, or subscribe to your favorite team, from sports all over the planet including : ESPN, TSN, Yahoo! Sports, NBA, MLB, NHL, FIBA.

Search Channels: With the Viigo RSS reader you can set up special channels. These channels will monitor content available on the web which is related to keywords you have specified. That content will then be delivered into an easily accessible folder for reading at your leisure.

RSS and Atom: The Viigo RSS reader is capable of delivering RSS feeds in all of the popular formats available, including

Packages: If you send a lot of packages through priority mail services, you will find a great added bonus within the Viigo RSS reader functionality. After you have installed the software, you will have the ability to track any packages you may have coming to you, or packages which are en route to their destinations. The Viigo RSS reader supports tracking for most of the popular mail and package carriers.

Recent Updates

New Account Registration Wizard

When you sign up for a new account with Viigo you are presented with the new sign in wizard. This wizard will guide you through the entire login process. Additionally you will have the option of participating in a “guided tour”. This guided tour will auto launch once the new registration has completed and provide information to new users about how the Viigo RSS reader works.

Registration Options

There are two types of registration options to choose from. The first is a guest account which provides access to the standard functionality of the Viigo RSS application. The second option is to register your account details with Viigo.

There are a number of benefits to registering your account details with Viigo:

• Login to Viigo from any Windows Mobile or BlackBerry device.
• Manage your Viigo feeds and services from the web.
• Take advantage of cool new services to come.
• Win Viigo swag, participate in Viigo contests, and join the Viigo community.

Enhanced User Interface

The Viigo RSS reader interface has been modeled after BlackBerry’s intuitive design. To assist in the identification of new/unread feed content, Viigo displays a red “tomato splat” at both the channel level and the article level.

The channel icon will have a red star or “red tomato” to indicate that the channel has new content. The articles within the channel that just arrived will also have a red star on the article icon.

Exiting the article list view will clear the “red tomato” on all the new articles (even if they remain unread). This will also clear the “red tomato” on the channel icon on the channel list screen.

In later versions, the “tomato splat” will be extended to the desktop ribbon (for devices running firmware version 4.2 only).

Article Alerts customizable for all BlackBerry profiles (Quiet, Loud, Vibrate, In Holster, etc.)

The notification feature from the beta version of the Viigo application has now been extended to include alerts. These alerts are customizable notifications tied to specific events within Viigo. The alerts are audible and are tied into the BlackBerry standard profiles. Eg. Normal, Quiet, Vibrate etc. You have control over how each alert is handled depending on which profile is selected. This means that the alerts will behave differently when you have your BlackBerry holstered/unholstered, set to vibrate, on mute etc.

Within Viigo, alerts can be turned on or off for each channel by highlighting the channel and selecting: Menu > Set Channel Alert. The alert can also be set conditionally, to trigger on the arrival of content that matches keywords entered by the user. A popular example of this is setting the keyword “Rain” for the Weather channel, thereby alerting a user to bring his umbrella to work.

When alerts are triggered, all items matching alert criteria are aggregated in a special view called My Alerts.

Alerts are only triggered on an auto update, or when the user first turns on Viigo (which triggers an update). Note - Manual update of all or a single channel will not trigger alerts.

When the device is holstered and a Viigo alert is triggered, if the user “unholsters” the device within a few seconds, Viigo will open up automatically and open to the My Alerts screen which contains all the alert items.

Client side Channel Renaming

When you set up a channel within Viigo, it is given a pre-defined channel name chosen by the publisher. With the latest version, you can now customize (or rename) the titles of the channels that you subscribe to. The new channel names can be anything you want.

In the main Viigo screen, highlight the channel you would like to rename, and select “Edit Channel”.

On this screen, in addition to the earlier information of channel URL etc., users will find an entry for Custom Name. Any name that is entered here will override the channel name that was specified by the publisher. Since Viigo sorts the list of channels alphabetically, changing the name allows the user to order the channels they way they want.

For instance, all weather channels for various jurisdictions could have a custom name prefixed with Weather: thus ensuring that all these feeds will be grouped together in the channel list.

On Demand Collection

As the number of channels in the Viigo database increases, it is bound to take longer and longer to cycle through each one and gather updated content from the publisher. It is fortunate then that they have included a new feature that allows you to “force” the collection of new data from a specific feed.

When the user updates a single channel via the menu option in Viigo, the server will immediately fetch the most up to date items from the channel URL (instead of delivering whatever items it has collected thus far in its database).

The exception to this is if the last fetch from the channel URL comes within its TTL (time to live). The TTL is imposed by publishers in an attempt to minimize bandwidth usage on their servers), and specifies the minimum period of time that RSS aggregators are required to wait between two consecutive accesses to the channel URL.

My conclusions

The Viigo RSS reader has impressed me. Throughout every step of the installation, setup and testing, Viigo has performed flawlessly. New content is downloaded quickly and all of the features performed exactly as I thought they would.

The one aspect of the Viigo service which appealed to me most was the ability to register an account online. While this may not seem to be a huge bonus to some, for me it is a life saver. I love the fact that I can access my entire feed list from any mobile device with a simple login process.

Overall, I would suggest giving the Viigo RSS reader a shot.

Update: On January 30th the team behind the Viigo RSS reader for BlackBerry released an update for the application. Now on version 2.2.80, the Viigo software has been upgraded to address some of the improvements requested by the community.

Included in the most recent update is an improvement in the frequency of which your news feeds are updated and delivered to your BlackBerry. You will also be pleasantly surprised by the amount of screen real estate you have now compared to the last release.

A few more features that have been upgraded or added are: Preservation of user defined font styling, new shortcuts, one click emailing of articles, blogging right from Viigo, support of foreign language character sets and last but not least, the ability to sync your Google Reader account.

All in all, a great update to an already great product.

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