FeedDemon 1.6 Teaser: You asked for it!

Published on by Nick Bradbury

I hope that the last three
teasers have shown that your feature requests are taken seriously. Every one of these big new features is the
result of feedback from FeedDemon users. But FeedDemon 1.6 isn’t all about big new features – there are a lot of smaller additions that also resulted from feedback, such as:

  • Option to minimize FeedDemon to the system tray instead of closing it
  • Ability to view a newspaper of all watches or news bins
  • Watches now have an auto-purge option
  • Option to disable resetting the feed URL on permanent redirect
  • Surfer and Expando newspaper styles enable opening external links in a new browser tab
  • “Channels” and “channel groups” renamed to “feeds” and “folders”
  • Feed import enables re-creating OPML folder structure
  • “Copy to news bin” added to favorites menu, enabling copying the current browser page to a news bin
  • Support for Atom 0.8 enclosures
  • FeedStation now retains a history of previously downloaded files

Now, one of the concerns I often hear when a new version is released is that the added features “bloat” it, making it more complex for new users. I’ve tried to do just the
opposite with FeedDemon 1.6 – I’ve spent a lot of time simplifying FeedDemon, so it’s cleaner and sleeker than the previous version. Oh, and did I mention
that it’s faster, too? :)

25 thoughts on “FeedDemon 1.6 Teaser: You asked for it!”

  3. Nick, you just aren’t right teasing us like this :). Have I mentioned that between you and Jack, I’m going nuts waiting for this? :)

  7. It’s fantastic that more and more people are realising just how much Nick listens to his customers – it was the major reason I purchased FeedDemon as soon as it had been released, even though I had a free license for my help in beta.
    Keep up the good work Nick, and I hope Newsgator doesn’t clamp down on this behaviour – it’s so rare in the industry today.

  8. I have noticed the slowness also. It seems to have happened when I went to 1.5. I notice it most when marking all items in a channel as read and when switching to the next channel. There is a delay after issuing each of those commands before the action completes. I would say it is about 1-2 seconds.

  9. I’m not surprised at all. Nick takes home the gold every single time :) Btw. congrats on the whole NewsGator business. It’s nice that you feel in place and stronger financially. All in all the new situation should be a huge benefit for the users.

  10. Good. FD could use a speed bump – it seems to be getting slower for me lately. Especially when switching channels – but sometimes when seemingly nothing is happening, the app “locks-up” for several seconds while sending cpu utilization to 100%.

  11. Adam, the _last_ thing FD needs is a speed bump…speed increase, sure, but Nick shouldn’t put anything in to slow it down (sorry, first thing I thought of when I saw “speed bump”). I’ve also experienced the three-second lock-ups accompanied by 100% CPU utilization, but I’ve always written it off to keeping all of my groups (133) in a single channel. Thankfully, that won’t be necessary with v1.6!
    Nick, on a side note, will the Channel Bar “scroll” at the same rate that the News Item List does? By this I mean, when you click on the NIL’s scroll bar, either above or below the slider, the screen scrolls up or down by one screen-full. However, the when you click on the CB’s scroll bar, it only moves by five or six channels.

  12. Great, but how about fixing the lack of support for non-latin characters? This would immediately make FD attaractive for users in totally new areas of the world, and make some exiting users very happy too.

  13. Nick, most recently (as in yesterday) FeedDemon was behaving slowly, so I opened up the Windows task manager to find that it was eating up a lot of CPU cycles – but I don’t know what was eating them. If I see it again, I’ll report it.

  14. I just can’t see why you change the easy-to-understand “channel” and “channel group” to something that is comparatively hard for newbies, that is “feed”. Though it is a common word but IMO it is not widely used before RSS became popular. So please keep them “as is”. Thanks a lot!

  15. Sure Nick listens to his customers which is great but he also causes us mental breakdowns with all these teasers!
    Nick, you are one evil man. A ‘demon’ some might say ;)
    Crap joke I know :( *g*

  16. Bill,
    Agreed, wholeheartedly – Nick, PLEASE DO NOT MAKE FEEDDEMON SLOWER! I HEREBY WITHDRAW MY REQUEST FOR A SPEED BUMP! :)
    -adam

  17. One more thing –
    A smart person, instead of living with a slow FeedDemon for month and months, would have simply searched the support forum and discovered that merely running the cleanup wizard would have made their FeedDemon run as quick as the day they first installed the software.
    -adam

  18. Well done, Nick… sounds like it’s shaping up to be a great release. Thanks also for clarifying the feeds/folders versus channels/groups thing. With the previous teasers mentioning “folders”, I wasn’t sure what was what.
    I look forward to checking it out… and giving the NewsGator services a fair shake ;-) … when it’s all ship-shape.

  19. Adam, I can’t speak for everyone, but in my case the occasional “slow-down” hasn’t tripped my PITA threshold yet.

  20. Enough of the teasers, I want some beta code. Heck, I will settle for alpha code now.
    I love the zippiness of FD, but I am looking forward to the enhanced synchronization piece (so that I can use my NewsGator account to keep all my feeds in sync).
    Finally, I will admit that I would also love OPML files that were nice and easy for me to edit. Although, with the advent of NewsGator synchronization, my need to do so will go away.
    I just had a thought, though. In addition to unread and read status of synced feeds, will we also have subscriptions synced. Thus, if I add a feed on computer A, will computer B get it when it syncs?
    Enough rambling, though. Keep up the good work, Nick.

  21. i think it would be cool if you offered a free version of FeedDemon. Maybe kinda like a ‘Lite Version’ or something because i really like feeddemon but not enough to justify buying it.

  22. What features would you be willing to go without in a “Lite” version? Would you be willing to see additional advertising, perhaps like Opera?
    On the flip side, what at what point do you feel FD would be worth $30. What additional features would you need to justify the cost?

  23. RyanS – Why should Nick do a free version? If you like FD that much I’m sure you can come up with the $30. It’s not that much money and I’m sure you’ve wasted $30 on much stupider stuff. If you don’t think it’s worth the money then go use another product; don’t ask Nick “liten” his fantastic product because you’re too cheap.

  25. FeedDemon 1.6 beta 1

    Nick Bradbury, miután beharangozta az új fícsörõket, és megbeszélte a kusztomerekkel, hogy akkor most hogyan is legyen ez az elõfizetõsdi, tegnap végre kiadta a FeedDemon 1.6 elsõ bétáját. Az új változat már képes szinkronizálni a NewsGator online rendszerével (korábban történt Bradbury egyesülése a…

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