I en­joy cre­at­ing desk­top ap­pli­ca­tion­s. That means I may be a mem­ber of a dy­ing breed, since web apps are go­ing to make us all ob­so­lete next week, but I do en­joy do­ing it.

The bad side of it is, of course that some­times it's much more con­ve­nient to use a web ap­pli­ca­tion. For ex­am­ple, I have aban­doned my own ba­by (uRSSus) be­cause google read­er is just eas­i­er and more con­ve­nient to use.

But then I thought... what both­ers me of uRSSus? And there are quite a few things!

1. It's not in all com­put­ers I may use

   That means I will not ev­er be able to use it ex­­clu­­sive­­ly.

2. It's pret­­ty use­­less with­­out an In­­ter­net con­nec­­tion (but so is google read­­er most­­ly)

3. Since I can't use it ex­­clu­­sive­­ly, I end with feeds on uRSSus that are not on google read­­er and vicev­er­sa.

4. It's freak­ing slow

So, I de­cid­ed to see what I could do about that with­out giv­ing up the good side of uRSSus:

1. It looks much nicer than a web ap­p, be­­cause it looks like a desk­­top app

2. It does things like open­ing the site in­­stead of show­ing the feed item (great for par­­tial con­­tent feed­s)

3. I wrote it (yes, that's a fea­­ture for me. I like self­­-­­made pro­­gram­s)

So, this at­tempt at rewrit­ing the desk­top RSS read­er pro­duced this:

As you can see in the above video, this read­er syncs the sub­scrip­tion list to google read­er. It will al­so even­tu­al­ly sync your read­/un­read post­s.

It still can open full sites in­stead of feed item­s, it has/will have a heck of an off­line mode (full pages cap­tured as im­ages, for ex­am­ple), and... it's very very fast.

It's much faster than google read­er in Chromi­um, and hel­la faster than uRSSus. That was done via smarter cod­ing, so it prob­a­bly means I was brain­dead be­fore and ex­pe­ri­enced a mi­nor re­cov­ery.

The code is not fit for re­lease (for ex­am­ple, the data­base schema will change) but you can try it: http://­code.­google.­com/p/kakawana/­source/check­out