March 3rd, 2008
My 10 favorite Windows programs of all time
FeedDemon for Windows (NewsGator Technologies)
Info/Download
Price: Free
System requirements: Windows 98 or later, IE6 or later
I have tried just about every RSS reader the Windows platform has to offer and I haven’t found one that can compare to Nick Bradbury’s creation. I thought it was well worth the cost when I paid money for it two years ago. When parent company NewsGator cut the price to zero back in January, it removed just about any objection you should have.
When describing what makes FeedDemoin awesom, I hardly know where to begin. I keep track of something like 300 news feeds, organized into two dozen folders. It’s easy to speed-read through a bunch of news items in a given category to make sure I’m on top of whatever’s happening that day. The fact that it’s all in a searchable archive means I can retrieve bits of related information that appear days or weeks apart.
The search feature is a big money-saver if you’re searching for the best price on a product. Subscribe to the RSS feeds of a bunch of sites that specialize in highlighting great deals and bargains. Keep a few months’ worth of history in FeedDemon’s cache. For a quick snapshot of price trends for a popular piece of hardware or an entire category, press Ctrl+F3 and start searching.
I also love the Clippings pane, where you can create virtual folders on any topic you want and then assign individual feed items or web pages to a topic for easy scanning later.
It’s easy to manage feeds. You can go to summary pages and see which feeds in your list of subscriptions are Dinosaurs that haven’t been updated in months. You can also see which feeds you read the most and which you never touch. Too many unread messages? Hit the Panic Button and get a fresh start.
The whole product has a level of fit and finish that is exceptional. But you probably won’t notice that until you’ve been using it for months, because mostly it just works.
(Also, a feature request for Nick: Can you integrate FeedDemon’s storage with Windows Vista’s Search index? Please? Because that would make it just about perfect.)
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Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 03/03/08
