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).

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NewsGator has announced that they are offering their client software products as free software.  This includes FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Inbox, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile.  Also, the new version of FeedDemon (2.6) has been released.

This is quite a big deal.  FeedDemon is an awesome piece of software, and the synchronisation tool (also free) makes it invaluable for people who use it at home and at work.  Nick Bradbury has assured everyone that this doesn’t mean that development is going to stall now:

"Is this some sneaky ploy to stop development of FeedDemon and your other consumer products?"

Good lord, no.  I realize that some companies have made their software free as a first step towards dumping it entirely, but that’s not the case here.  If it was, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post - I’d be bitching at the top of my lungs in some bar somewhere.

This is a major investment on our part.  If anything, the pace of development will only get faster.  NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker goes into this further, but basically, there are two reasons we’re doing this crazy thing.

You need to download FeedDemon now!  I don’t care what other RSS reader you use, this one is better. The only reason I could conceive before now not to use it was the cost, but seeing as that’s now no longer an issue, everyone needs to use FeedDemon.  There are so many features, I’ve mentioned plenty before (see here).

Download, it’s what all the cool kids are doing!

Get it while it’s hot.  List of changes on that page.

I’ll back the first one straight out of the box, updating and synchronising is way faster, almost instantaneous in some cases. Seems to start up faster too.  Adding the Find Feeds option into the file menu is a nice touch for those who didn’t do it on install but now want to see what else is out there.

It just one more thing I love about FeedDemon; almost every minor release or release candidate has a new feature in it that users have requested, unlike most software where it’s just ‘invisible bug fix x fixed‘.