I’ve been playing with BLAM! a bit this morning, and I really like it. It has the same clean feel that Gossip, Evolution 1.5 and Epiphany have. It is, however, missing some important features. The most important for me is “mark all as read”. I read about a hundred and twenty feeds, with one or two gems for every ten articles. Eight extra clicks to mark things as read isn’t cool on the tendonitis. Equally annoying is that there’s no notification of new articles. I have to open BLAM! to check. The final is that it doesn’t obey /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels = TRUE.
That last nit is the single feature that keeps me sane using a traditional desktop under the influence of tendonitis. For years, I used sawfish with some very custom keybindings, just so I’d never have to use the hated mouse, which aggravates my tendonitis far more than the keyboard. Why GNOME decided to turn it off by default is a mystery to me, unless it was a case of the Moveable Toolbar problem that MS Word has. A total mystery is why it was buried with no UI at all, when the moveable toolbars get a nice little checkbox in the control-center. Re-assigning hotkeys is useful. Moving toolbars around isn’t. (Face it: How many people reading this use toolbars anywhere but the top of the window. I rest my case.)