As you can see from the release notes, there are a lot of changes in v2.6. Some of these changes – such as the vastly improved offline and prefetching features – are fairly substantial, but my primary focus with this release was to simplify FeedDemon, tidy it up, and generally make it faster and easier to use.
Under the hood, FeedDemon 2.6 offers some nice performance boosts. In particular, FeedDemon’s popular topics is an order of magnitude faster than it was. Newspaper rendering is also noticeably faster, and the redesigned offline prefetch is far less CPU-intensive than before.
Information junkies will appreciate the new attention report, which provides an overview of the attention you’re giving to each of your feeds (a great way to uncover feeds you can unsubscribe from). And I think the new Firefox-inspired inline search toolbar (Ctrl+F) will be a hit not only with Firefox users, but also with Internet Explorer users who never escaped the confines of IE’s "Find" dialog.
But the numerous UI improvements will be the most obvious changes – you’ll find a ton of little UI tweaks in this release which add up to a much nicer experience. I also spent quite a bit of time rethinking FeedDemon’s newspapers to make them even more readable. Among the improvements is a redesigned "headlines view," which enables rapidly scanning headlines for interesting articles. Here’s an example:
OK, that’s enough of a sales pitch :) If you’d like to give the FeedDemon 2.6 pre-release a try, just stop by the FeedDemon Beta Site to get it.