7 thoughts on “Why FeedDemon is Better”

  1. Great article. I definitely agree with the points made. The inactive feeds, panic button, desktop alerts, being able to clip articles and syncing with Newsgator are my personal favorites.I’m glad that you’re enjoying so much success with FeedDemon.
    You’ve made it clear in the past that when you’re quiet it means you’re a “coding machine”. Reading your posts are great but I love the anticipation of a new release. :)
    Keep up the great work!

  2. I love FeedDemon and was excited to start using the Windows Live Writer feature when I recently migrated to Live Writer. However, I find I generally don’t know I want to blog about an item until after I’ve opened the item up and started reading. (I normally go threw my feeds and open any articles I want in new tabs, and then start reading once I’ve loaded all my content.)
    I think the Blogging tool could be dramatically enhanced if you just gave us access to this feature from the “Tools” option when reading a blog entry. I’d love to be able to select some text on the page and then have that text automatically imported into Live Writer for me as a blockquote.
    That would really speed things up for me.

  3. Maybe I’m unusual, but I chose FeedDemon for very different reasons. The most important thing for me in using an RSS reader is keyboard navigation in newspaper view. I have set up FD so that I can do everything with a few simple keyboard shortcuts, mainly the keypad + key (for going to the next page), minus key above it (for going back to the previous page), and keypad asterisk (*) key (for opening the link of the next unread article). I also use Ctrl+ up and down arrows to select individual items on a page (which can then be opened by the Enter key).
    As far as I have been able to figure out, FeedDemon is the only program that lets me use a newspaper view and still open specific links if I want to read an article that does not have a full feed, without using a mouse, and then go back to the newspaper view (by pressing + or -). Most RSS readers simply lack the keyboard shortcuts for navigating easily in newspaper view.

  4. @Dan: I agree that it would be nice to enable blogging from any page that’s being viewed. In fact, at some point, I’d like to make it easy to perform a number of actions on the current page (send to del.icio.us, Digg, etc.).

  5. I really like FeedDemon, except for one thing: it’s not very customizable. For example:
    (1) By default, FeedDemon won’t refresh the feed display while that feed is selected and displayed on the screen. (KnowledgeBase article incorrectly says you need to press refresh button to achieve that; in fact, even that is not enough, you actually need to click on a different feed, and then move back to the feed in question.) Personally, I really want the feed to refresh automatically, but there’s no option to enable that.
    (2) Refresh frequency is limited to once per 5 minute. Again, while it’s reasonable for many scenarios, in my case I need to see the news item immediately — and so extra flexibility would have helped.
    Similar issues are present with other UI features. Hope you find this feedback useful.
    Cheers~
    Max

  6. Actually, things are even better than I realized. While the newspaper view does not update automatically, the news item view does update.
    However, I still believe FeedDemon could improve its handling of time-sensitive news. 5 min is a bit too restrictive. And if I choose to sync folder with NewsGator, things get a lot worse: the best update frequency I could obtain so far is around 30 min or so, even though I used the 5-minute setting.
    Overall though, FeedDemon is an incredible product. Really enjoy it.

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