The Internet has become an endlessly-gushing font of just about every type of information one might possibly be interested in — news, weather, sports, stocks, blogs, downloads, and much, much more. The recent advent of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has made finding and consuming this cornucopia of information much more convenient, saving us the time and trouble of visiting dozens of Web sites and other information sources daily to get our info-fix.
There are lots of ways to access RSS data, such as through a newsreader, an aggregation site like Bloglines, or a specialized application like Yahoo! Widgets, and most of them can take up a fair amount of desktop space. KlipFolio from Serence takes a decidedly minimalist approach to managing RSS data. The company boasts that KlipFolio is the smallest RSS dashboard currently available, a claim we have no reason to doubt.
Even after adding a bunch of RSS feeds, called Klips, KlipFolio takes up very little desktop space while still managing to be quite easy to interact with. KlipFolio runs on Windows 2000 or XP only, and is Windows profile-aware so each user on a shared system can have his or her own unique selection of Klips.
Interface
As soon as you download and install KlipFolio, it becomes abundantly clear that the theme of KlipFolio's UI is minimal and efficient use of space. The display format of each Klip is highly customizable — when you first add a Klip, only a small title bar is visible. The title bar displays menu and expand/collapse buttons along with the name and icon of the Klip and the number of unread items.
By pressing the expand/collapse button (or simply passing the cursor over it), the Klip enlarges just enough to display a few lines of text — this may represent several recent posts or just one if it's particularly verbose. Klips need not contain only text — they can include images as well. You can scroll through a Klip's list of contents by holding down the mouse button and moving the mouse up and down, though this can be a fairly kludgey motion (especially in a small space) so a mouse with a scroll wheel works much better.
When you place the cursor over an Klip entry, it calls up a tooltips-style window with additional detail (the level of detail varies by Klip and the information source) or, in the case of lengthy items like news articles, a brief abstract or summary.
To view the entire source item you can click the Klip entry, which will launch it in a browser window. Ideally this would be a new browser window, but unfortunately KlipFolio chooses to commandeer any browser instance (and it doesn't avail itself of tabbed browsers like FireFox).
There are myriad ways to customize the information a Klip displays to suit your specific needs. Most Klips let you filter their information by category, so for example if you are using a Klip that monitors currency fluctuations but only care about dollars, pounds, and euros, only those currencies will be shown.
Most Klips also let you configure alerts (in the form of a pop-up window or playing a sound) whenever a Klip has new or changed items, or items that contain a keyword you previously specified. There's no way to configure (or even see) how often a Klip will refresh since that's determined by the Klip author, but you can manually refresh individual Klips — or all of them at once — with a simple mouse click.
