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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