gHacks technology news » news software http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 FeedDemon RSS News Reader http://www.ghacks.net/2008/12/13/feeddemon-rss-news-reader/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/12/13/feeddemon-rss-news-reader/#comments Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:29:50 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=8979 Less than a month ago I switched from Google Reader to Newzie mainly because I wanted to use a system that would work independently from the web browser. Newzie looked really great and fast but it turned out that it had a few quirks that made me look for alternatives. The main problem was that it slowed down the system whenever it updated the RSS feeds. It was also problematic that the developers seemed to have stopped development which was more of a security concern at that time because feeds and everything related to them were working fine.

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.

feeddemon

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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