New FeedDemon only syncs with Google Reader

As FeedDemon closes in on finalizing the code for version 3, FeedDemon 3 RC 4 abandons its proprietary online synchronization at newsgator.com. The fourth release candidate syncs only with Google Reader, as FeedDemon's creator Nick Bradbury announced it would last week.

FeedDemon 3 RC 4 syncs with Google Reader faster and more cleanly than RC 3, but users with high unread counts will still lose most unread feeds.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Bradbury has stated in blog posts and forum messages that he hopes this will open FeedDemon to a wider audience, but the road to prepare FeedDemon for Google Reader has not been a smooth one. Many fans of the program have expressed frustration with the loss of features such as authenticated feeds and synced clippings.

In FeedDemon 3 RC 4, the synchronization scripts have been re-written to be faster and more accurate, and those changes show when compared to the third release candidate. The fourth RC only used 42 MB of RAM, as well. However, the conversion process won't be able to handle large numbers of unread posts, and limits the unread count to 10 per RSS feed. This is because Google Reader is limited to considering only 10 feeds unread from the past 30 days when subscribing.

Most of the other improvements in this release candidate are geared towards streamlining the conversion process to Google Reader. There's a new startup option to convert NewsGator subscriptions to Google Reader, and there's a link to create a Google Account from the Google Account window. Tags have gained prominence over clippings in the new version. Clippings will exist only if grandfathered in from a previous version.