Category: FeedDemon

FeedDemon 2.5 RC2 is now available. If all goes well, this will be the last build before v2.5 goes final.

I wasn’t planning to put out the first release candidate of FeedDemon 2.5 until next week, but a problem with Silverlight needed to be fixed, so RC1 is being released early.  If you’d like to get it, please stop by the FeedDemon Beta Site for details.

Earlier today we discovered a problem with the FeedDemon 2.5 beta that could cause it to crash when Microsoft Silverlight content is displayed in the embedded browser.  I’m testing a solution for this right now, and expect to release an updated beta version later this week which includes the fix.

For the record, this bug is caused by my code, not Microsoft’s.

Last week I sent über beta tester Andrew “Spyder” Herron a pre-beta version of FeedDemon 2.5, and among the new features he noticed was a per-feed setting that enables ignoring new items if they’re older than a certain number of days (useful for buggy feeds that keep bringing back old items as new).

Andrew made the point that this feature could be a problem when you’re away from your computer for a few days – for example, if you set it to five days and then don’t update your feeds for a week, you’re going to miss stuff. So we decided that it would make more sense to ignore items published N days prior to the last time you updated your feeds.

And I can’t for the life of me figure out how to name this feature.

The feature itself took very little time to code, but naming it has taken far too long. The name has to be short enough to fit in the feed properties dialog, yet long enough to effectively describe what it does. And it has use language that’s clear to non-geeks.

This sort of thing happens a lot – I spend more time figuring out what to call a feature than I do coding it in the first place.

I’m taking the week off, but before I skip town I want to leave a teaser of what’s coming in the next FeedDemon. In addition to the features mentioned in the previous teaser, there are a couple of other noteworthy additions.

Synchronized News Bins

FeedDemon’s ability to synchronize with NewsGator Online means that your subscriptions are available on any computer you use. But in the past your news bins have not been synchronized, so items you added to a news bin were only available on the computer you were using when you added them. As you can see from the screen shot below, this limitation is finally being addressed:

Oh, and there’s a nice bonus feature here: you’ll also be able to share your news bins as RSS feeds, so others can subscribe to them.

Who’s Linking Here?

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.

The next release of FeedDemon takes advantage of this by adding a “Who’s linking here” icon () next to each article. Clicking this icon shows you who’s talking about that article, with a separation between links within your subscriptions and links in everyone’s subscriptions (in other words, you can see the feeds you’re subscribed to which link to that article, as well as feeds that everyone in NewsGator Online is subscribed to which link to that article). Here’s a screen shot:

This feature is especially handy in FeedDemon’s “Popular Topics” personal memetracker, 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).

PS: Expect a beta release next month!

There’s a nice review of FeedDemon in this month’s Smart Computing:

“I’ve used FeedDemon for years, but the recent 2.1 version NewsGator recently turned loose offers the best overall functionality, interface, and performance I’ve seen from an aggregator to date…I still subscribe to my local newspaper, but even if it published an edition 10 times a day, it couldn’t deliver the news to me with the speed and ease of use FeedDemon does.”