The BlogBridge, Crossing the NewsRiver?

After posting my switch from NewsGator to FeedDemon (Outlook is running much faster now), I got a note from Pito Salas of BlogBridge. I had taken a look at their client a few months ago, but ultimately turned away from it due to its foundation in Java. I have nothing against Java itself, but its performance on Windows is worse that .NET – which is bad to begin with. Life is much better (read: faster) without .NET or Java apps on the desktop. However, that doesn't mean the apps (themselves) aren't without merit. As Pito pointed out with BlogBridge (points which I largely understand and/or agree with)

• Designed for info-junkies who have to follow hundreds and hundreds of feeds as part of their job
• Only one with full support of OPML reading lists (you can publish a folder, dynamically, as an OPML, as well as subscribe to one, dynamically
• Free and open source and (you probably don't care) cross platform
• Very flexible “Smart Feed” feature to build synthetic feeds (very analogous to iTunes Smart Playlists)
• Photo Album display for feeds which are mostly pictures (like a Flickr Feed)
• Direct integration to lots of specialized sources like Delicious, Findory, Feedster, Technorati
• Very flexible sorting and filtering based on lots of criteria including your own “Star” rating of a feed

BlogBridge would be a great contender if it could just leap out of its Java skin. I particularly like the default views (clean, uncluttered). Until then, it's FeedDemon on Windows – for which I need to find much better style sheets / XSLT transformations.
Dave just emailed and noted that NewsRiver (the aggregator baked into the OPML Editor) also supports reading lists! I should chime in here and note that I've been wanting to get reading list support in Gada.be's OPML for some time (parsing search feeds inline instead of just pointing to the feeds themselves). Shayne only has so much time in the day, though; the world doesn't have enough developers in it.

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