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‘.

Finally got myself a laptop (well, got work to get me one anyway..) and so I’ve not got a use for FeedDemon’s Prefetch feature.  It is now officially My Favorite Feature^™.  With a 1 hour train trip out of the city I’ve got a fair amount of time to kill & I’ve already gone through my bookshelf twice!  About 10 minutes before I left work I did a final refresh of all my feeds and then set the pre-fetch running.  With all my feeds (~200) it took a little under 5 minutes to finish. 

A few things to note:

• It will take a while if you’re on a slow connection and/or you have a huge number of unread posts.
• It’s probably a good idea to go into offline mode after the pre-fetch is finished so that everything that’s unread is fetched.  It would be annoying to have something else come in a minute before you leave and you have to wait until you get home to read it.
• If you use a synchronised news bin, setup a non-shared news bin to dump stuff into until you’re back online again. (It would be nice if synced bins just cached stuff until you went online, like it does for marking items as read).
• It defaults to loading only 5 links per feed item, which means that for posts like the del.icio.us auto-posts, all you’re likely to get is the 1st link and it’s tags! You can increase this number, but it will also increase the amount of time it takes to load. It would also be handy if you could specify some domains for the pre-fetch to ignore (del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.).

This really is an awesome feature that highlights again for me the advantage of having a client application to do this, rather than, say, Google Reader.  Even with Gears installed, Reader can’t do this.  If you find yourself offline on a long commute, FeedDemon is a winner.

Despite being involved in a hit-and-run car crash this week, Nick Bradbury has still released a new beta version for FeedDemon.  There are, as always, a huge number of improvements & new features, but the one I’m happiest about is that my Posting to Live Writer from FeedDemon app is now completely redundant.  FeedDemon now detects Live Writer as a blogging client when you select ‘auto-detect’ in the Configure Publishing Tools window.  Alternatively, if you don’t want to loose the other publishing tools listed there, you can create a new Tool called ‘Windows Live Writer’ with Command Line or URL value of {wlr}.  Good to see the 3 R’s are still being taught in schools.

Oh, and the new paginated newspaper view with Blue Vista style rocks!

Nick Bradbury has released the latest version of FeedDemon, managing to yet again improve performance, along with some bug fixes & other enhancements.

Get it while it’s hot

tags: Nick Bradbury, FeedDemon, RSS, Atom, Feed Readers