Category: FeedDemon

One of the most popular additions to FeedDemon 2.5 was the ability to prefetch unread items, which downloads and caches your unread items so they’re available offline.  Not only does FeedDemon prefetch images in your unread items, but it also caches links to external web sites, enabling you to click a hyperlink which appears in an unread item and still view the external page even without an Internet connection.

Despite being well-received, the truth is that the UI for this feature is downright unfriendly.  When you start a prefetch, the progress is shown in a floating dialog which obscures what you’re reading.  If you choose to hide this dialog, an icon in the system tray shows the progress instead.  It worked, but it was both ugly and confusing.  It’s one of those designs that made sense when I created it, but in retrospect makes me wonder what I was thinking.

So I decided to rectify this by ripping out the old prefetch UI and replacing it with a much simpler one which appears within the main FeedDemon window, as shown in the screenshot below:

This will be available in the next build of FeedDemon (sorry, no release date yet – but it will be sooner rather than later).

The week before FeedDemon 2.5 was announced, NewsGator’s Leland Rucker interviewed me about its new features. If you’d like to listen in on the discussion, you can download the podcast here.

PS: Subscribe to the NewsGator Podcasts feed for more interviews with NewsGator developers.

Over the past few days, I’ve highlighted some of the big additions to FeedDemon 2.5.  But as you can see from the release notes, there are a ton of other new features.  I can’t possibly describe them all here, but there are a few I’d like to mention:

• “Dinosaur” report (lists feeds that haven’t updated recently) [screenshot]
• “History of Auto-Discovered Feeds” (similar in concept to your web browser’s history – shows feeds that have been auto-discovered while browsing inside FeedDemon) [screenshot]
• Ability to choose which feeds to show in the desktop alert (you’ll love this if you rely on FeedDemon’s popup desktop alert to tell you about new posts)
• Support for slash:comments (see the number of comments a post has)
• Synchronization of flagged items
• Dozens of performance improvements throughout

All in all, FeedDemon 2.5 is a significant release (it really should’ve been named FeedDemon 3.0), and I think it’s a big improvement over previous versions.  But don’t just take my word for it – check out what others are saying:

• CyberNet News
• Brad Feld
• Neville Hobson
• Glenn Slaven 
• Andrew Connell
• Graham Tucker
• Todd Mitchell

Online video has been taking off like crazy, but previous versions of FeedDemon have been stuck in the past because they prevented embedded videos from displaying in your subscriptions.  Luckily, FeedDemon 2.5 corrects this.  Now you can subscribe to video-enabled feeds and have their videos securely displayed within FeedDemon’s newspaper view.

Which means that if you’re viewing this in a FeedDemon 2.5 newspaper, you get to watch this completely irrelevant video of a guy failing to jump his car across the St. Lawrence river.

Watch a screencast about FeedDemon 2.5’s Popular Topics

One of my favorite things about FeedDemon is that it’s a hybrid reader which combines the power of a desktop application with the data mobility of a web-based one. This also means that FeedDemon isn’t limited to showing only desktop-based data – it can also show aggregated data from NewsGator Online.

FeedDemon 2.5 takes advantage of this in several ways.  The popular topics report (“personal memetracker”) from the previous version has been completely re-written, and now includes the most popular articles in everyone’s subscriptions.  So you can view what’s popular within your feeds alongside what’s popular among all NewsGator Online subscribers.

You can also find out who’s talking about a specific article with the new “Who’s linking here” feature.  A simple click shows you who’s linking to a post, with a separation between links inside your subscriptions and links in everyone’s subscriptions.

This feature is especially handy within the popular topics report, because it enables seeing who else is linking to the most popular articles in the feeds you read (a great way to find interesting new sites).

Watch a screencast of FeedDemon 2.5’s offline features

FeedDemon’s support for offline reading isn’t something every customer uses, but those that need it absolutely love it. And they’re going to love FeedDemon 2.5 even more, because it adds a host of new features aimed at making offline reading even better.

The most obvious addition is the ability to prefetch unread items. This handy feature – which is found under the “File” menu – downloads web pages and images that are linked in your unread items, making them available even when you’re not connected.

This is especially nice if you’re subscribed to feeds such as Engadget which contain a lot of images. In the past, viewing these feeds offline meant seeing broken red X’s where the images were supposed to be, but FeedDemon’s prefetching solves this problem. Here’s a screenshot which shows how Engadget looks when FeedDemon 2.5 is offline (hint: it looks exactly the same as it does when you’re online).

When you’re working offline, links which haven’t been prefetched have a red underline to let you know they’re not available. Clicking a link that has been prefetched shows the offline copy of the linked page.

In addition to these features, there are a number of smaller improvements that add up to make FeedDemon’s offline support far better than it was (and it was already pretty good). If your current feed reader won’t work without an Internet connection, why not give FeedDemon 2.5 a try?

After months of coding and testing, FeedDemon 2.5 is finally here.  As you can see from the release notes, this is a significant update – it really should be called FeedDemon 3.0.

I’ll be blogging about what’s new over the next few days, so for now, just go get it. Simply install it directly on top of v2.x, and all of your existing settings will be retained.