I was using FeedDemon (now a product of NewsGator's Nick Bradbury, rather than Bradsoft's Nick Bradbury) before I switched for a little while to GreatNews for a change of scenery. Now FeedDemon 2 beta 1 is out, so in addition to demoing The Bat! 3 I'm trying FeedDemon 2.
It's pretty awesome, once you get it in "river of news" mode, though it has a few inefficiencies that I miss from GreatNews:
- Each folder page has a "Mark this folder read" button, when it should be a "Mark these items read" button. If new items were added to the folder, they seem to be marked read too. GreatNews marks items read when you click the "Next" link to go to the next page.
- There's no global option for how often to refresh feeds. It often takes me more than an hour to read my news, so by the time I get done, FeedDemon is refreshing and finding more new items. Rather than get sucked into a reading cycle, I'd rather set every feed to refresh in four hours, but you seem to be able to set refresh times only on individual feeds.
- The titles of read items are not bold, so in the default style, it's hard to read a feed of unread items as you can't glob items together as individual items. But I was only reading read items because I had imported my GreatNews subscriptions and wanted to read today's news, after marking everything read.
Other than that, it's great. In trying FeedDemon again, I'm switching from feed-grouping to date-grouping, so there's one other thing I'd like to see: user icons for feeds, like in Kinja. That would help me notice from what feed an entry is while they're sorted by date. (And oh, cool, Kinja's using favicons now for feeds that don't have their own images defined in feeds. Or maybe that's not new.)
FeedDemon 2 also has my favorite feature ever: clicking a link to a website opens it in Firefox. I can now discard the painful habit of copying links out of my feed reader! Yay!!
The beta doesn't work with NewsGator for me, as I get some error about activation. If I click "Retry," it gives me the NewsGator account info dialog, where I can click "Cancel," which gives me a nonfatal crash with lots of juicy debug data available and no option to report it to Nick. If I click "Close," FD gets all confused, and seems to simply freeze up. Its processor and memory usage don't spike, it just sits there with an hourglass.
But that can totally be fixed. I'd just like to play with the NewsGator integration! Perhaps in the next beta. Meanwhile I'm definitely using FeedDemon 2.
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ohhh, thanks for the review so far… I’d been hearing about this and even seen the screenshots, but hadn’t had a chance to actually try it out. I think I’ll have to play with it some today now that I hear your thoughts on it! :)
Since I use FeedDemon on my work laptop and NewsNetWire on my mac (both purchased before they were part of NG!), I keep thinking that maybe there’s something in NewsGator’s joint stuff that would help me if I wanted to see something I was reading in one computer from the other computer. but heh, i haven’t had a chance to figure it out yet either :P