Amit Agarwal from Digital Inspiration has posted that FeedDemon, the best RSS reader ever, has been updated to version 2.7.  It’s kind of unexpected as the last version that was announced by Nick Bradbury was the 2.6.1 RC2.   Nick has added Amit’s post to his shared clippings folder, but other than that there’s been no ‘official’ announcement.  FileForum seems to have gotten the update first, and then the Newsgator download page was hastily updated to the 2.7 version (the page still mentions the 2.6 version, but the download file is for 2.7).

Looking at the changes list that Amit has posted for 2.7, I’m not seeing anything in there that wasn’t in the release notes for the 2.6.1 beta releases.  Looking at just the ‘Added’ stuff, I’ve put the beta version that the feature was originally announced next to it.

• Added: Significant performance improvements when navigating subscription tree - 2.6.1.2 (Beta 3)
• Added: “Find Feeds” now enables subscribing to multiple feeds at the same time - 2.6.1.0 (Beta 1)
• Added: Multi-line URLs pasted into the address bar are shortened to a single line (hat tip to IE8) - 2.6.1.0 (Beta 1)
• Added: Secure URLs are now drawn with a light yellow background in the address bar - 2.6.1.0 (Beta 1)
• Added: Clippings folders that have an RSS feed now have an RSS icon overlaid on them - 2.6.1.0 (Beta 1)
• Added: Context menu added when right-clicking a feed in subscription home report - 2.6.1.0 (Beta 1)
• Added: Subscription wizard now warns when attempting to add a private (intranet) feed to a synchronized folder (125583) - 2.6.1.0 (Beta 1)
• Added: $ITEM_SUMMARY$ and $ITEM_SUMMARY_PLAIN$ added to “Blog This” tokens - 2.6.1.0 (Beta 1)
• Added: Numerous optimizations to tabbed browser performance, esp. regarding favicons - 2.6.1.0 (Beta 1)
• Added: Synchronization optimizations - 2.6.1.0 (Beta 1)
• Added: “Show in External Browser” added to tabbed browser’s context menu - 2.6.1.0 (Beta 1)
• Added: When “Keyword View” is the current view, the keyword now appears next to the “Subscriptions” item in the tree - 2.6.1.3 (RC1)
• Added: Multiple enclosures per post are now supported - 2.6.1.3 (RC1)

As far as I can see that list is the entire list of changes from the 2.6.1 Beta all the way up to the RC2 release, so either something’s gone very wrong here, or Nick & Newsgator decided that there were so many changes that it warranted a new version rather than just a revision update.  The latter would make sense, it just seems odd that the announcement was made by Digital Inspiration rather than by Nick or Newsgator.

I have downloaded & installed the 2.7 version & it seems to have the same functionality as the 2.6.1 RC2 release, but I could have quite easily missed something.   There are a few posts about this on the Newsgator forums, but no ‘official’ word as yet.

Update: I just remembered that Nick’s been in Denver all this week, so this release has probably not had much to do with him.  There’ll probably be some more information coming out now he’s back.