One of my favouritest programs, FeedDemon, officially went to version 2 a couple of days ago after quite a long beta period. FeedDemon is an RSS reader that works kind of like Outlook. Its a stunning piece of software. I can’t believe I’ve been using it for nearly two years, it certainly doesn’t seem that long! I’ll have to do a useful utils write up on it at some point since it is something I use nearly every day.

The list of changes from version 1.5 to 1.6 (not officially released) to 2.0 is huge. The two biggest changes for me are the feed navigation and NewsGator integration.

FeedDemon 1.6 left, FeedDemon 2.0 right

In pre-version 2.0, a drop down list was used for the feed / subscription folders which to be honest, I thought worked fine. However its now been replaced with a treeview, as you can see above. It has made a big difference to usability. You can see all your folders at once and as you navigate through it can be set to automatically expand the folder you’re in, and close any others. You can very quickly jump between unread feeds by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + J. Its also nice to be able to see what folders have updated feeds to look at.

Now having a NewsGator account means I can just login with FeedDemon to keep up to date with my feeds in one place, which is ace. It sure beats storing them on a pen drive and carting that between machines, like I used to do!

I have to admit I was slightly reticent to the NewsGator takeover of Bradsoft at first but it seems to have worked well. The fact that Nick has been able to keep FeedDemon’s identity and character, as it were, is great. I had a fear that it would just be rebranded and merged in with NewsGator’s other products and forgotten about. Thats definitely not the case.

I’m looking forward to future versions of FeedDemon, I’m curious to see what they’ve got up their sleeves next!