Other additions and new features of FeedDemon 3 include a redesigned user interface, enhanced Twitter feed reading and replying, automatic hyperlinking, article sharing, performance improvements and tagging. The changelog lists dozens, if not hundreds of additional changes and additions to the RSS feed reader.

The interface of FeedDemon is divided into several levels. You got the header area with tools and options, the left sidebar with subscriptions, tags, watches and clippings, the main area that displays popular items on the start page, feed titles, excerpts or full articles once a feed or category has been selected.

Feed Demon can import feeds from various sources. It can import from an opml file or from external sources like Google Reader, Bloglines, RSS Bandit or Windows Common Feed List directly.

Windows users who are looking for an RSS feed reader for their operating system should definitely give FeedDemon 3 a try. The download is provided at the developer’s website. It is compatible with Windows XP or later.

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RSS Xpress is another desktop rss reader that does not come with the functionality of the latest version of FeedDemon but provides users with an optimized interface that looks like those of desktop email clients. Users can import their feed lists from other applications right into the RSS reader which is available as a portable version as well.

The feeds are displayed in the left sidebar of the application. They can be grouped in folders or listed as single feeds. The top pane of the main window contains the feed titles and other information while the lower pane displays the feed message. Some feeds are not displayed fully which is rather strange considering that they are displayed with their full text in other feed readers. It comes with filtering and notification options but stays pretty basic otherwise.

The main benefits of RSS Xpress are that it is available as a portable software program and that it is easy to use without all the advanced features offered by other feed readers. It does however require the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 which is included in Windows Vista and later and should be installed on most Windows XP systems as well. Users who like advanced features might want to take a look at the latest FeedDemon beta version or Google Reader.

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FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 comes with several interesting new features and also one drawback which will be addressed later on. The short setup wizard will be started even if an older FeedDemon version is installed on the computer system. This might confuse users as it could seem that all feeds that have been added to that version have been lost during the upgrade. This is however not the case. The old feeds will be integrated into the new version. This takes some time as the feed items are imported and the databases checked.

The first thing that springs to mind is the new interface that looks friendly to the eye. The RSS feeds are still listed in the left sidebar and the contents in the main right window. A new addition is a small advertising window at the bottom left of the screen. That’s the drawback that I mentioned earlier on in the article. The advertisement is not really that obtrusive but could irritate or annoy some of the users.

A lot of new features have been added to this version of FeedDemon including tagging support for items which can be synchronized with Newsgator and displayed in various ways including a tag cloud at the Subscriptions Homepage. Multiple new features have been added for Twitter users like subscribing to Twitter feeds with avatar images, Twitter timelines, balloon popups for short urls that display the redirected page, replying to Twitter posts directly, automatic hyperlinking of information in Twitter feeds, the ability to send links to Twitter and even a Twitter search engine.

That’s a lot of additions for Twitter users but that’s only a tiny fraction of all the new features of FeedDemon. Users can now import Google Reader subscriptions directly but still no Google Reader synchronization. This feature is planned and it might be released in upcoming versions of FeedDemon 3.

Performance has been improved quite a bit especially when searching subscriptions or browsing popular topics. There are two interesting – and new – export options available. The first will export feeds in newspaper format into an external html document. Excellent for sending someone else a compilation of interesting feeds in that format. The second is to export the top feeds only.

Interested users can take a look at the full changelog of FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 here. This is also the location from where the RSS reader can be downloaded to the local computer system.

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GreatNews is another desktop rss reader that comes with all the features one would expect from a rss reader. It can import opml feeds which is a standard XML format that contains feed information. Basically any feed reader can export and import opml files. The first thing that observant users will notice is the low resource usage. A direct comparison between FeedDemon and GreatNews revealed that GreatNews was using between 10-20 Megabytes of computer memory less than FeedDemon did. (GreatNews uses about 3 Megabytes when minimized while FeedDemon uses more than 7 MB)

Resource usage is not everything on the other hand. Updating feeds in the rss reader seemed to be a bit faster than it was in FeedDemon as well. This might be caused by a subroutine of the desktop rss reader that automatically detects dead or feeds that have not been updated in a very long time giving the user the option to remove those feeds from the rss software. FeedDemon has a similar option as it displays feeds that are no longer working or have not been updated in a specific time as well. This is a manual process however.

One of the more interesting features of GreatNews is the so called News Watches. This makes it possible to make the desktop rss reader search for keywords automatically in previously defined rss feeds. It is for example possible to search for the name “Bill Gates” in all subscribed rss news feeds, or for the term Linux only in the Ghacks feed. This is an excellent way to find keyword related news articles faster than usual.

Other features are:

• Various styles can be selected, custom ones created. This includes styles that do not display images, flash or other multimedia contents.
• Offline reading.
• Saving news articles locally.
• Article labels to access articles faster.
• Full page reading
• Statistics
• Track Comments

Are there any disadvantages? The only thing that’s not looking bright is support for the desktop rss reader. While the software developer is still active on the website he does not seem to have plans to update the software further except for a few necessary bug fixes. This is not a problem right now as everything in the news reader is working as intended and without complications. GreatNews as of now is an excellent alternative to FeedDemon.

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FeedDemon was a RSS news reader that many people seemed to recommend. Rarst was one of them and he made me take a closer look at the software. The RSS news feeds were exported to OPML format in Newzie so that I could import them in the reader if OPML import was supported.

FeedDemon is the Windows software of the Newsgator family of products. There are also clients for Macs, mobile devices and even an online reader (that is synced with the local feed reader) for those who want to use both an offline and online product.

It was possible to import the opml feed into FeedDemon. The program began to update the feeds immediately. The first thing that users will notice is the speed of the program. It is very responsive and does not produce slowdowns even when updating feeds.

Feeds can be sorted and displayed in numerous ways. It is for example possible to display only the titles of the latest feeds, or to display summaries or full posts if that is desired. Next to each title are information about the data and site that published the news and options to mark it read, flag or delete it, to send it to someone, add it to clippings or see who is linking to the article.

A click on the title can open the url in the default browser. This has to be changed in the options as the default display mode is in FeedDemon itself. Keyboard shortcuts such as [CTRK M] which marks all posts on the active page read speed up the work further.

All elements of the feed reader have been streamlined to be fast and efficient. Here are just a few examples of features that make FeedDemon an excellent feed reader:

• Caching: Download contents for offline reading
• Panic Button: The Panic button can be used to mark older feeds as read if you are really lagging behind.
• Reports: Will display feeds with errors, most popular feeds, popular topics (by analysing similar topics in the subscriptions or by using the online account), feeds that have not been updated for a while.

FeedDemon is the most responsive feed reader that I have worked with (and I had my share of offline and online RSS readers). It is fast, offers options to sort the feeds after my liking and integrates nicely with the default web browser.

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FeedDemon is the most popular program due to the whole set of services Newsgator has created for connecting feeds and devices. NewsGator Online is the web-based service which provides a central repositry for your feeds which can then be synced to various PCs, Outlook, Mobiles, iPhones and Macs.

Nick Bradbury has just released beta 1 of FeedDemon 2.8 which the object of simplifying the interface and improving social and sharing features:

Looking back at early versions of FeedDemon, it’s obvious that I was raised in the Microsoft Office school of user-interface design.  Namely, fill your application with toolbuttons, the majority of which most people will never use

What on Earth was I thinking?  There were so many toolbuttons showing that I had to stack toolbars on top of each other to fit them all.  At the time I thought I was giving customers the features they wanted, but what I was really doing was scaring people away by overwhelming them with far too many choices.

Each version since then has been an exercise in killing toolbuttons.

…

Each article in a FeedDemon newspaper has a series of icons beneath it, and over time the number of icons has grown to the point that they’ve become a serious distraction.  For example, with the addition of the sharing and tagging icons in the upcoming FeedDemon 2.8, each article would have 10 icons beneath it.

Most customers use only a few of these icons, so I’ve removed most them by default in FeedDemon 2.8.”

…

The reason so many people miss FeedDemon’s sharing feature isn’t due to “user error,” of course, but because I made it too geeky and too hard to find.  In order to share an article in the current version of FeedDemon, you have to copy it to a “clippings folder” that has an RSS feed – and as you can see, it’s far from obvious how to do this:

1. Create a clippings folder
2. Choose to share it as an RSS feed
3. Click an obscure icon under the article’s headline to display a menu of clippings folders
4. Choose the clippings folder you want to copy the article to

Not exactly the simplest approach, huh?

So I decided to rectify this in the upcoming FeedDemon 2.8 by adding a single, obvious “Share” link – which is how I should’ve done it in the first place.

Aside from these changes there is also some bug fixes. The 2nd beta now out and the second is coming soon.

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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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