Yes, I got excited about RSS Bandit a couple of days ago after it was released in Alpha with NewsGator and Google Reader Syncing capabilities. I have yet been able to get this to actually work and have found the program so buggy as to be unusable. It frequently crashes, spiked the CPU and cause other system instability.

It’s a non-commercial product however so I’m no going to complain too much, just wait for the next version to be released… hopefully a usable beta! A quick Google showed that other users have found it fairly unusable as well.

Download Squad:
“At least that’s the theory. In practice, we’re still waiting for our changes to show up in Google Reader. We read a few items, unsubscribed from a feed, and over an hour later Google Reader is showing no sign that it’s noticed. This is still Alpha software, so it’s possible speedier updates could come at a later date.”

NotGartner:
“Last weekend I was subscribed to over about 1000 RSS feeds and conicidentally last weekend RSSBandit also became unusable. Obviously I had reached some kind of threshold that the architecture of RSSBandit wasn’t designed to cope with.”

Problems with RSS Bandit are much more prevalent on Vista, so I hope with time this will be addressed.

Eric Denekan
“For reading RSS feeds, I use RSS Bandit and until now I was not able to use it, because even though I could install is, I could not configure it correctly or download my feeds from newsgator. The interface froze.”

These where the same issues I experienced but considering it was posted two years ago I would have thought by now it would have been fixed. Considering this post was also written around the same time and the promise has been yet to materialise.

So it looks like I will keep using FeedDemon for some time now. Unfortunately NewsGator are quite insistent that they will not be introducing any Google Reader synchronisation to FeedDemon as they feel NewsGator Online to be the faster and superior product. I think that if this is the case then surely they have nothing to worry about as consumers will be able to see which product is best themselves.

Newsgator Forums:

“We think Google Reader is pretty cool, but we probably won’t sync with it in the near term. NetNewsWire syncs with the NewsGator online reader which has a faster and friendlier new version in beta right now. Going forward, NetNewsWire will be able to sync additional data with NewsGator Online to give features that aren’t available in Google (like seeing the most popular articles recommended for you based on what others are reading).

That being said, feedback from users is important to us. If we continue to hear this request, we’ll move it up the priority list for consideration.”

Sure sure.

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However good as NewsGator Online is, after a while I began wishing FeedDemon synchronized with Google Reader instead. I much preferred having a desktop application then a web-based, but I would prefer still more to have access to both.

NewsGator Online is adequate as a web RSS reader, but nothing more, I find it slow and un-intuitive. In contrast using Google Reader offline through Gears just can’t be compared to a dedicated desktop application like FeedDemon.

However just this week I was excited to see the first Alpha version of RSS Bandit released. RSS Bandit is a desktop feed reader written with the .NET framework and which synchronises with either NewsGator Online or Google Reader!

I have only just downloaded it and begun using, so I’ll provide a better update later on how I find it, but so far I’m loving it.

The first thing you’ll notice is it looks very much like Outlook which provides for an attractive, clean and familiar interface, but it would be nice to have the option to change it a bit, even just the colour scheme.

Yes, there are quite a few little bugs, but I haven’t noticed anything major so far. It’s very fast, in fact a lot faster then FeedDemon, although I will have to wait and see if it slows down as it gets more feeds to handle.

As I said, I’m liking what I’m seeing, but haven’t had a proper opportunity to try it yet, so when I have I will let you know wether not it really is a better solution the FeedDemon and if I’m converted.

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