I recently upgraded my RSS reader from the older version I was still using to the current version. That turned out to be a mistake. The new version was even more broken than the old version, so I decided it was time to switch. I remembered RSSOwl from several years ago when I tested it on IKVM (it uses the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit, so like Eclipse it was a good test app back when AWT support was completely useless).

I downloaded the most recent version and played with it and it appeared to suit my needs. Of course, after I decided that I was going to start using it, I wanted to run it on IKVM and not in dynamic mode, but compiled with ikvmc. Fortunately, RSSOwl uses OSGi in much the same way as Eclipse, so I was able to reuse the work I did to get Eclipse to compile with ikvmc.

To play along at home, follow these instructions (on Windows):

• Download rssowl-2.0.5.win32.zip, ikvmbin-0.44.0.5.zip and rssowl-clr.zip and put them all in the same directory.
• Open a Command Prompt and go to the directory where you downloaded the zip files.
• Run these commands:
  unzip rssowl-2.0.5.win32.zip
cd rssowl
unzip ..\ikvmbin-0.44.0.5.zip
unzip ..\rssowl-clr.zip
mk
• Start RSSOwl by running rssowl-clr.exe