FeedDemon is PC World’s Editor’s Pick

Published on by Nick Bradbury

[PC World Editor's Pick]FeedDemon won PC World’s editor’s pick in their recent roundup of RSS readers, beating out NewsGator, Bloglines, Radio Userland and 15 other RSS readers.

I sort of announced this before, but had my head so buried in the release of FeedDemon 1.10 that I completely missed the fact that FeedDemon won the editor’s pick (!). My wife refers to this as my “mad scientist” mode – I get so caught up in what I’m doing that I miss even the most glaringly obvious things.

To be honest, I’m usually not too excited by winning these product comparisons. More often than not, past reviews of my software have been written by people who wouldn’t use it in the first place and don’t know what problem it’s trying to solve. This review, though, is different. It’s obviously written by someone who knows about RSS and took their time to really test each product. So…I’m excited by this one :)

19 thoughts on “FeedDemon is PC World’s Editor’s Pick”

  1. I really like FeedDemon, but the inability to synchronize caches/feeds online so that I can use FeedDemon on work desktop, laptop, and home desktop without seeing the same articles again and again is a complete showstopper.
    From my discussions, MANY Bloglines users find this to be the one indispensable feature that keeps them from moving to some of the more featureful client apps…

  2. I agree that synchronization is a plus. That’s why I keep my FD cache files on a USB key drive. Switching between home and work is easy.
    My total cache size is only about 3MB. Even an el-cheapo 64MB drive would be overkill for this particular app.

  3. Funny you should mention that Jack, because I recently bought a KeyDrive to sync many of the apps I use. Nice to know that FD can do this as well.
    I use the Keydrive to store my RoboForm data so that I can have my logins no matter where I go. I also use it to sync email from TheBat! with the synchro files that it can create.
    USB thumb drives are much more useful than they seem on the surface.

  6. That is great :)
    I agree that a way to sync easier is needed, unless you give away 64MB USB Keyring drives with each purchase heh ;)
    Not really sure what you could do though. Perhaps some automated archive (to ZIP) of the FD cache folder would be good and they you can just drag the ZIP file into the FD window and it knows what to do with it? I think web syncing would be too hard. My Cache folder is over 30MB so uploading/downloading that isn’t really possible. Even compressed it is pretty big!
    Do you have any ideas of what to do? Does anyone?

  7. Way to go Nick! Not a day goes by that I don’t open up FeedDemon at least twice. In fact, I think I do more work with FeedDemon than a web browser these days!

  8. Morgan,
    You may want to try lowering the storage size for some of your feeds.
    – Right-click on the Channel
    – Select “Channel Properties”
    – Choose the “Updating” tab and lower the “Auto-purge” setting.
    Unless you’re really attached to keeping 250 posts around, this will help reduce the file sizes.
    One thing about using the USB drive is that, once your cache is on the drive, FD doesn’t have to move all 30MB back and forth. It only opens individual channel files as necessary.

  9. Morgan,
    You may want to try lowering the storage size for some of your feeds.
    – Right-click on the Channel
    – Select “Channel Properties”
    – Choose the “Updating” tab and lower the “Auto-purge” setting.
    Unless you’re really attached to keeping 250 posts around, this will help reduce the file sizes.
    One thing about using the USB drive is that, once your cache is on the drive, FD doesn’t have to move all 30MB back and forth. It only opens individual channel files as necessary.

  10. In case you missed it, Nick, FeedDemon also got first mention in an article in the Wall Street Journal’s Technology supplement to the May 24th edition (p. R12). Congratulations on the PC World Editor’s Pick – it’s well deserved.

  11. Congratulations Nick! I thoroughly enjoy using your product and am glad that others recognize its worth as well.

  13. Geez, give Nick a break! Sorry, but your post looks like chest-beating over something not that great. And Java on the desktop? EWW! I prefer native all the way than a slow Java app with a clunky, generic UI. It’s great you like your app better, but I find it rather rude to bash FD here.
    I’ve tried quite a few free/lite newsreaders (Awasu, Abilon, Sauce even Opera) BTW and came out liking FD the best. Why make it look like an e-mail app? My guess is that everyone knows and understands e-mail. Don’t make me learn a new UI or method of doing things when all I want to do is read news.
    Nick’s also good at listening to user feedback, so I wouldn’t be surprised if features like synchronization don’t pop up in future releases. Considering Nick’s commerically successful products, I think he has a good pulse on users. BTW, power users are usually only a small percentage of any given market.

  14. Just a thought. After reading about archiving, it occurred to me that many peopla have on line storage, such as the briefcase at yahoo or something like that, or even a home ftp. Could FD archive to somewhere like this, with parhaps an option to only archive the last x days or something like that?
    Not being a programmer, I don’t know how difficult this would be if even possible. Enjoying exploring your app.

  16. “ryandear”: I removed your comment. I don’t mind criticism, but if you want to advertise your own product, this isn’t the place to do it.

  17. Okay, just the criticisms, then, because I’m truly interested in your response (despite how it may have sounded I *do* admire you and your software, which is clearly better than most):
    1) FeedDemon costs money, which is essentially like asking people to pay for access to HTML-based browsers
    2) Too much use of wizards for tasks which should be quick and easy
    3) No support for textInput
    4) Treating news headlines like email (ala Outlook) and making users think that they should be deleting them is contrary to what makes RSS so much better and more efficient than email in many ways. “Save,” maybe, but not delete! The #1 reason I hate email is how much filtering/deleting it makes me do…
    You have a fine site and I’m always tuned into your channel (you clearly understand the concept of newsfeeds better than most bloggers do I’d say, and not just because you actually have usefull stuff to offer). Just wanted to say that if anything, you should be (and probably are, anyway, I’ll bet) focusing on an app that lets users *make* feeds, not just read them. If FD does let you do that (did I see something about integration with some such blogger X?) it certainly isn’t the main focus.

  18. The flash drive solution hasn’t worked for me because I have to specify a drive letter and on different machines that drive letter is different… if that makes any sense :)
    Oh well, here’s hoping Nick will sometime see the light that one of the major benefits of RSS is to busy folks who might actually use more than one computer!

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