I’m pleased to announce the release of FeedDemon 1.5 BETA 1. In case you haven’t already read about this in Scoble’s blog, the big news is that this beta release includes integration with Bloglines. Here’s some background on how this came to be:
A few months ago I read a comparison of RSS readers which described FeedDemon and Bloglines as competitors, and that didn’t sit right with me. It seemed to me that our customers would be better served if we worked together instead of being competitors. Many FeedDemon customers were asking for a way to synchronize their feeds between multiple computers, and I’d read a number of comments from Bloglines users stating that while they loved the seamless synchronization, they preferred the flexibility of a desktop application. So I sent an email to Mark Fletcher asking if he’d be interested in providing a way for FeedDemon users to access their Bloglines subscriptions – and it turned out that he already thinking along these lines, and wrote back with details of a synchronization API his team was working on.
Over the next few weeks I worked with Mark to simplify the API, and his team did a great job providing a lot of functionality through a simple RESTful API that’s very easy to support. The end result is that FeedDemon (and soon NetNewsWire and BlogBot) offers integration with Bloglines, enabling you to keep your feeds synchronized between multiple computers.
Starting with version 1.5, FeedDemon users can create a Bloglines Channel Group from their Bloglines subscriptions. When viewing a Bloglines Channel Group, items you read in Bloglines won’t show up in FeedDemon, and items you download in FeedDemon won’t show up as unread in Bloglines. It’s very easy to synchronize with your Bloglines subscriptions so that FeedDemon reflects feeds you add or remove from Bloglines.
If you’re an existing FeedDemon customer, stop by the FeedDemon Beta Site to download FeedDemon 1.5 beta 1. While you’re downloading, you’ll want to read the release notes since there are a lot of other changes in this new version you’ll want to know about. Note that the final release of version 1.5 will be a free upgrade for all FeedDemon customers.
Update: NetNewsWire‘s Brent Simmons posted his thoughts on the Bloglines integration here and here.