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May 16, 2008 7:00 AM PDT

FeedDemon gets tweaked

by Seth Rosenblatt

Newsgator's FeedDemon, the formerly pay-for-play, now freeware, RSS feed catcher upgrades to Version 2.7 with one useful new tool and a flowering bunch of bug-fixes. The Mac version, NetNewsWire, has also been updated.

FeedDemon's main window

(Credit: CNET Networks)

FeedDemon now lets users subscribe to multiple feeds at the same time, under the tool name Find Feeds. For longtime FeedDemon users, there are a stack of improvements that should be instantly noticeable to users who've raged against the occasional "flagged" feed drop and other problems synchronizing multiple configurations across several PCs and operating systems.

FeedDemon's biggest claim to fame in Version 2.7 is a supposedly faster response time. This, of course, will depend on your personal system and its limitations. Running the latest code build for an hour, I sadly noticed few changes from Version 2.6. There still seem to be bugs syncing flagged items for high-traffic feeds. Other improvements include support for multiple enclosures, also known as "podcasts" to the rest of us, and support for multiline URLs--they now get shortened to one line when you paste them.

Overall, though, the changes are at worst negligible and at best a minor but welcome improvement. Let's hope that future versions eliminate syncing mishaps, but I've been gladly using FeedDemon since it went free at the end of last year.

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by tashfeen_m May 16, 2008 12:17 PM PDT
The last time I used FeedDemon I thought it was pretty RAM-intensive, and it also doesn't manage its alerts well. Perhaps the last part is just me, but the RAM issue was enough for me to drop the program. Now I use the online Google Reader to read my feeds. Could anyone else suggest alternatives?
Reply to this comment
by shahidalalam May 16, 2008 1:43 PM PDT
have you tried mozilla thunderbird? its very clean and simple; not RAM-intensive; and it can read your email...

or actually the simplest and most legible RSS reader for me is simply to visit the website's RSS page listing (with a bookmark or something) and click on the RSS button and just read the feed in Firefox. But that's just me. I hate cluttered programs.

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