Jeff Nadeau - Beyond Lektora & Microsoft

• Lektora, launched in October 2004, was one of the first browser-integrated user-friendly RSS reader. It was released for both Internet Explorer and Firefox and compatible with Windows, MacOS X and Linux.
• As a single man effort, Lektora was truly quite an achievement.
• The intellectual property was successfully sold to Qumana in June 2005.
• Tightly integrated into both Internet Explorer and Firefox as a plug-in, the front-end was implemented in JavaScript/DHTML and the back-end in Ruby. That ingenious architecture enabled extremely rapid development and portability of the product.
  Lektora intellectual property was successfully sold to Qumana Inc. in June 2005.
• Technologies used: Ruby, C++, COM, XPCOM, ATL, JavaScript, HTML, XML, CSS, RSS, Atom, IE Toolbar, BHO, Firefox extension, XUL, XPI, cross-platform development
• Unfortunately, Lektora is not maintened anymore by Qumana therefore you cannot try it on your computer.

Some notable features

Lektora user interface used the “newspaper” metaphor and you could browse the articles per feed, group or all together. Only a simple click in the Lektora toolbar was sufficient to get the latest news.

RSS subscriptions could be easily ordered and grouped. A built-in directory even proposed popular feeds.

The super-fast search engine helped overcome information overload.

Discovering and subscribing to the RSS feed behind a particular web site required only a single button click.