FeedDemon – First Impressions

As I noted briefly in the last post since I have a NewsGator Online account FeedDemon automatically pulled all of my subscriptions and setup my category folders. The first thing that I noticed is that the feeds are located in a folder tree on the left sidebar, very similar to NewsGator Inbox (in Outlook) and NewsGator Online. One main difference is the My News folders are listed above the My Clippings folders. Interestingly what was My News in the other applications is simply “Subscriptions” in FeedDemon. Another thing that is different here is there is not a NewsPage per se. So if you select either Subscriptions folder from the folder tree you will not see a mix of all the posts that are in the category folders, but rather the reading pane will populate with a list of all of you subscriptions that have unread items. If you select Clippings you will see a list of clippings category folders that have unread items (this will not be by post, it will be by folder).

Overall the folder tree pretty much works the same as the online version and the plug-in. When you select a category folder you will see a list of headlines in the reading pane. From the reading pane you can tell FeedDemon if you would like to see just the headlines, headlines and a summary or the full post. This is done through the icons listed in the top right side of the header bar on that appears in the reading pane when you select a folder. You can easily switch between all 3 settings without any additional steps. Simply click on the full post icon to see the full posts, click the headlines icon to reduce all the posts to just the headlines.

You will also notice that next to these icons are the words Feed, Date and Title. These basically give you the ability to change the filter or the sorting of the headlines. If you have selected a category folder with more then one feed then you can select Feed and FeedDemon will automatically sort all the feeds to be in order based on the alphabetical order of the feed names in the category folder. If you select date (which is the default when you open FeedDemon) it will provide all of the posts in chronological order regardless of the feed that they originated from. If you select title FeedDemon will group all of the headlines with the same title. This is helpful because you will notice that many times news agencies will use the same news, for instance MSNBC and the NY Times might carry an Associated Press story so you can easily skip over the duplicates. You may also find that the same headline written by different authors or written as an update to an earlier post.

One thing that I really like is when you select one of the headlines it automatically launches a new tab within FeedDemon that takes you to the post sources and shows you the actual webpage. This is especially nice with posts that include pictures or a picture gallery. It appears that it uses the same settings as internet explorer so if you use Firefox as your primary browser do not be surprised if some of the settings are a little different.

Next time I will drill a little deeper into web page views and start looking at the tab functionality a little more.