Category: FeedDemon

Will Google Reader Give You Your Attention Data?

Published on by Nick Bradbury8 Comments

There has been some buzz this week about the new trends feature added to Google Reader.  It is a nice feature, and it will be even better once it includes aggregated trends of all Google Reader users.  Being able to see the feeds you pay the most attention to is great, but it’s equally great to see what everyone else is paying attention to (and of course, data about what large numbers of people are paying attention to is incredibly valuable to both publishers and advertisers).

The data about these aggregated trends belongs to Google, which seems fair enough to me.  But what about your individual attention data?  Should Google own the information about what you are paying attention to in Google Reader, or should they give it back to you?

And yeah, I know, the fact that this blog post is written by someone who kinda-sorta competes with Google Reader automatically makes it suspect.  But quite honestly this goes beyond my role as the developer of FeedDemon.  As Touchstone’s Chris Saad points out, FeedDemon has shown your attention data for quite a while now, and I’m pleased to see the importance of attention spread to other aggregators.

I’ve written about attention data many times in this blog, including in this post which begins the conversation about including attention data in OPML.  Not much has happened with OPML+Attention since then, but perhaps we can jump start the conversation again?

Google Reader – like every aggregator – supports OPML import/export.  So Google Reader folks, why not include your customers’ attention data in your OPML export, and support it in your OPML import?  Nothing fancy is required here – a simple feed rank would be a nice start. 

OPML may not be the most precise format, but we’re all using it, so it seems like the obvious choice for sharing attention data between aggregators.  But if Google chooses another format, that’s fine – I’ll use it, too.  The important thing here isn’t the format, but whether or not Google is willing to give its customers their attention data.

What’s Coming in the Next FeedDemon?

Published on by Nick Bradbury17 Comments

There will be a few minor FeedDemon releases before the next major version, but “minor” doesn’t necessarily mean “small.”  In fact, the next minor release will include a few oft-requested features:

  • Big improvements in offline reading: The next FeedDemon contains a number of things that make it even better for offline reading, including the ability to download and cache unread items (as described here and here).
  • Search tweaks: The subscription search can be limited to a specific date range (screenshot), so you can search for items in subscribed feeds that were posted today, yesterday, this week, etc.   And as I mentioned earlier, the address and search boxes are being combined  (this small UI change not only conserves space, but it’s also pretty useful).
  • Dinosaurs report: First seen in NetNewsWire, this feature shows you the feeds that haven’t updated in a while – great for pruning your subscriptions of inactive feeds (cropped screenshot).

I’m still in “development mode” (also known as “mad scientist mode”), so expect to see other improvements in addition to these.

Simplicity Ain’t So Simple, Part V: Combine Features

Published on by Nick Bradbury2 Comments

In this series of blog posts for developers, I’ve talked about simplifying your software by hiding non-essential features (or not adding them in the first place).  But sometimes you can simplify your software by combining features.

That may sound weird, but take a close look at your application and chances are you’ll find some features that overlap.  Look even closer and you may discover that you can combine those features in a way that makes your application simpler.  Here’s an example:

Over the past few releases of FeedDemon, I’ve struggled with the number of items to show on the toolbars.  I wanted to make sure that the most important features were easily accessible, but I didn’t want to overwhelm new users by showing too much at once.

By far the biggest struggle has been with the toolbar above FeedDemon’s integrated web browser, which looks like this:

Notice that the address and search boxes are separate?  To geeks like me it makes perfect sense to do this, but as Ivan Ičin points out, less experienced users don’t always see these as separate actions.  So this week I decided to combine them, like this:

And you know what?  Not only is this more intuitive for inexperienced users, but I’m finding that I like it better as well (a lot better, in fact).  Combining these features is simpler than having them separate.

Combining features can also mean making an educated decision about an action the user makes.  For example, although you can explicitly tell FeedDemon to mark an article as read, it’s automatically marked as read when you click its title to navigate to it on the web.  You’ve chosen to read the article online, so why force you to mark it as read?  By combining the two actions, FeedDemon is simpler to use.

Similarly, TopStyle has one toolbutton for refreshing the internal browser so that it shows the latest changes, and another toolbutton for saving those changes to disk.  But when you save changes to disk, TopStyle assumes you’ll want to see those changes, so the browser is automatically refreshed.  Not forcing the user to explictly refresh the browser after saving changes makes TopStyle simpler to use.

These are minor things, sure, but it’s the little things that keep people using your software for the long haul.  It’s easy to impress new users with a shiny new UI, but if you want to keep them as customers, save them a few steps.

Improving FeedDemon for Offline Use

Published on by Nick Bradbury24 Comments

One of the benefits of using a desktop RSS reader instead of a web-based one is that you can read your feeds offline – a major plus if you’re frequently without a reliable Internet connection.  FeedDemon is already a good offline reader, but I’d like to make it a great one.

One thing that’s annoying when working offline in the current version of FeedDemon is that you’re asked whether to go online every time you click a link to an external web page.  That’s fine if you can easily go online, but it’s pointless when you don’t have a connection to the Internet (like when you’re on a plane, or attending a conference with spotty WiFi).  To remedy this, I’m changing FeedDemon to check whether the page exists in the browser cache, and if it does, it will display the cached page instead of asking to go online.

This ties into a request I’ve received quite frequently: the ability to prefetch (download) links and image in new items as they’re received, so you can work offline and still view external images and links in those items.  In the past I’ve shied away from this since I feared it would require too much storage and slow things down, but perhaps I’ve been thinking about it all wrong?

It seems to me that most people wouldn’t really need cached links and images available for every single item – it’s really only the unread items they want to read offline.  So, instead of prefetching links and images every time your feeds are updated, what if FeedDemon simply provided a way to prefetch unread items right before going offline?

This is something I’m experimenting with right now, and it seems to work pretty well (and it’s pretty cool being able to visit web pages you haven’t seen before even when working offline).  The only stumbling point I’ve found is that some web sites use cache control headers which interfere with offline viewing, but since most sites are cache-aware this doesn’t appear to be a major problem.

So…for all you offline users, would these additions make FeedDemon the perfect offline reader for you, or is there something else I need to do to make it even better for offline use?

Jack Brewster is an ex-NewsGatorite

Published on by Nick Bradbury4 Comments

If you’re a TopStyle or FeedDemon customer and you’ve ever contacted our support team, chances are you know who Jack Brewster is.  A couple of years back, Jack was an avid poster to my support forums – and he was so helpful that I convinced NewsGator to hire him after they acquired my company.

Jack has done an amazing job since then, not only answering countless emails and forum posts, but also doing “house calls” when people blogged about a problem they were having with one of our products.

Sadly, today is Jack’s last day with us.  As he states in his blog, he’s enjoyed his time at NewsGator, but working from home just wasn’t his cup of tea.  So when he had an opportunity to return to his previous job, he jumped at the chance.

I’d like to publicly thank Jack for the great job he’s done for us.  Jack, I can honestly say that having you on board has made the transition to NewsGator much easier for me, and also easier for our customers.  Good luck in your next position – and keep in touch!

Special Secret Feature Inside

Published on by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

Of all the new features in FeedDemon 2.1, the one I use the most is pretty well hidden (and I should probably correct that in the next release).

The feature is “Mark page read and goto next page,” which is accessed by hitting Ctrl+D.  If you’re more of a mouser than a keyboarder, you can add a toolbutton to the toolbar above the subscription tree which performs the same action (if you’re not sure how to add a toolbutton, all you have to do is click the arrow at the far right of the toolbar).

This simple feature saves me a lot of keystrokes and mouse clicks.  In one single action, it takes care of marking items as read and moving to the next page in the newspaper.  Even better, if you’re on the last page of a newspaper, it automatically moves you to the next feed which contains unread items.

If you’re using FeedDemon 2.1, give this feature a try – I think it will make it even quicker for you to move through all your unread items.

ANN: FeedDemon 2.1 Now Available

Published on by Nick Bradbury4 Comments

I’m pleased to announce that the final release of FeedDemon 2.1 is now available.  Changes in FeedDemon 2.1 include:

  • Pagination: FeedDemon’s newspapers can now span multiple pages, which provides a significant performance boost when viewing a large number of items. Note that the number of articles per page can be customized on the Reading tab in FeedDemon’s options.
  • Popular Topics: Select “Popular Topics” from the Browse menu or click the “Popular Topics” toolbutton on the toolbar above FeedDemon’s browser to see which are the most frequently linked articles across your subscriptions.
  • Redesigned subscription search: Hit F3 to search your subscriptions, and limit your search to any feed or folder.
  • Security lockdown: FeedDemon now completely disables scripting in its newspaper view, so even if malicious script finds its way into someone’s feed, FeedDemon won’t execute it.
  • Keyword highlighting in watches and subscription search results.
  • Keyboard navigation of news items and single-key shortcuts when the newspaper has the focus.
  • Integration with Windows Live Writer. If you don’t already have a blog publishing tool configured in FeedDemon, FeedDemon will automatically detect Live Writer. Otherwise, click the “Auto-detect” button on the “Configure Blog Publishing Tools” dialog to add Live Writer.
  • YouTube Video Search
  • Send any article to Digg
  • …and the usual assortment of performance improvements and bug fixes!

For a complete list of changes and fixes in this release, please refer to the FeedDemon 2.1 release notes.  And if you have any comments or questions about the new version, let us know by posting to our support forums.

Enjoy :)