A View from the Isle

After reading Steven Hodson’s review of the new FeedDemon 2.8 beta, I pinged Nick Bradbury on Twitter to see if I could get on the test of early testers. Nick sent me the links to the latest version and sent out to the group at the next build.

You might think that trying FeedDemon in a pre-release beta is a risky thing, yeah well this is Nick we’re talking about. I can’t remember ever getting a bad beta build from him. I’ve been on FD 2.8 for about a week now and loving it. I had been feeling I had been neglecting my RSS feeds so this was a great time to get back into the habit.

Steven pointed out the biggest feature addition to FD which is the ability to tag items so you can group them, etc. I’ve tagged a few posts, but I’m waiting for the one-key hotkey in the next build to really rock the tagging (my RSS workflow is a both hands on the keyboard thing and limited mouse use).  What I noticed first and foremost is that FD is peppier than ever. Nick even added some cool visual effect going between pages (nice tough I think). You might wonder in these days of Gears-enabled Google Reader (and even the founder-creator of Bloglines using GR I hear) why people should even care about a client-based reader, well I’ll tell you flat out that GR will never be able to have the features and flexibility that FD has, not without serious Greasemonkey work that is.

Every time I try to switch back to GR, even just to try something out, I’m just left thinking, yeah but I need x, y, z feature … oh FD has that.

Like the panic button? Mark everything over 48 hrs old read? Brilliant. Flexibility of views, power searches, fine tuned ability to control RSS updates? Yeah all there.

I don’t have to worry if FD has the latest version of a feed, it just does.

Look, I have dropped Outlook for Gmail, I’m using GoogleDocs more and more (I still need Word though I find), but RSS, man nothing beats FD.

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Tags: chrome, client apps, feeddemon, google reader, greasemonkey, RSS