ANN: FeedDemon 2.5 Public Beta

Published on by Nick Bradbury

I know it has been quieter than usual around here, and there’s a good reason for that: I’ve been coding like a madman on FeedDemon 2.5.

FeedDemon 2.5 – which will be free to all existing FeedDemon customers – has actually been in beta for several weeks, but I haven’t mentioned it here yet in order to keep the number of testers small. Today saw the release of FeedDemon 2.5 Beta 4, so I figure it’s time to let it loose.

As you can see from the release notes, there are a lot of additions in FeedDemon 2.5, including these new features:

  • Synchronize a FeedDemon news bin and expose it as an RSS feed that anyone can subscribe to (for example, my link blog feed is created by drag-and-dropping feed items and web pages into a FeedDemon 2.5 news bin)
  • Vastly improved offline support, including the ability to prefetch links and images in unread items for offline reading
  • Completely rewritten “Popular Topics” personal memetracker (screenshot) which includes the most popular topics in everyone’s subscriptions (as described in the FeedBurner blog)
  • Embedded videos now display inside FeedDemon’s newspaper
  • “Who’s linking here” – quickly find out which sites are linking to an item in any feed

If you’d like to give the beta a spin, stop by the FeedDemon Beta Site to get it.

Note: Although I try to make my beta versions as solid as possible, they inevitably contain a few bugs. If you’re not comfortable using unfinished software, please wait until the final release before downloading FeedDemon 2.5.

13 thoughts on “ANN: FeedDemon 2.5 Public Beta”

  1. mmmmmhhh…I really love Feeddemon, but I am migrating into Ubuntu Linux…Are You planning to make Feeddemon fully compatible with Linux ??? Please answer YES !!! AAAAggggghhhhh !!!!! I cant live without FeedDemon !!

  3. I have successfully run FeedDemon versions as recent as 2.1 to run on the Dapper Drake release of Ubuntu under Wine. The only thing that doesn’t work is the tray icon, but that’s not a big deal.
    I haven’t tried 2.5, but I usually wait until it’s final before I see if I can get it to run. (I also have to rebuild my Linux box too :) )

  4. Delphi for Linux is called Kylix. The big issue would be FeedDemon’s reliance on IE, though. Still, as long as it works with Wine, you’re good.
    Nick, the style redesign with “Mark page read” alone is enough for me to upgrade. Thanks. Looking forward to all the other little things.

  7. Grabbed the FD beta, and just wanted to say it looks nice. It’s mostly faster (though clicking on a folder with lots of feeds still takes a while to build the summary). It definitely looks better, both the subs bar and the reading pane. I’m glad you got rid of the highlight-background bit. “Popular topics” takes much longer to build, but works much better, which seems a reasonable trade-off. :-)
    So, basically, thanks. :-) Apart from one small feature I’d like to get added, FD is pretty much the perfect reader, I think.

  9. Well Nick, I’ve been a FeedDemon user from day one. About a year ago I switched to Google Reader, which works just perfect for my needs. Now and then I check out your latest betas. But I can’t get used to Newsgator. It just doesn’t feel right. So, from the moment FeedDemon allows synching with Google Reader (Google Reader API should be on it’s way) I’ll be back and I’ll refresh my subscription. But for now: you lost me. I’m sorry about that.

  11. Paul, glad to hear you like the new beta. You’re right that it takes longer to build the popular topics – but this only happens the first time you use this feature, so I hope it doesn’t detract too much from it.
    BTW, I’m working on speeding things up when you click a folder.

  12. Just tried popular topics again and it’s lightning fast, so that’s great. Nice work, whatever you changed!
    Out of interest, what profiler do you use…? I don’t know many people still using Delphi, so I’m curious. :)
    The only thing ‘missing’ now – Akregator has a dedicated “Articles” tab (== newspaper). If you click on a feed in the left bar, it takes you to the articles tab, rather than overwriting whatever you’re reading right now. I quite like this behaviour. Is this something you’d be willing to add to FeedDemon, or do you think it would cause too much confusion?
    (I can make this a separate post in the support forums if you’d prefer.)

Comments are closed.