FeedDemon – Reading Pane Tools

Today I looked at the tools in the reading pane of FeedDemon. The first thing you will notice is a toolbar at the top that looks very similar to a web browser. Some of the basics, which I will explain in further detail shortly, include forward and back arrows, an RSS button and favorites star as well as a line in order to enter a url. This toolbar is laid out fairly intuitively and makes navigation very easy since it uses familiar icons.

Starting from left to right, there is a back button and a forward button and these two buttons will work as you expect. These will move you forward and back through anything that you have looked at in the current session. So for instance if I look at the Dilbert feed, then the BBC feed then the Engadget feed, but I want to go back to the Dilbert feed I can select the back button and I will move sequentially through what I have just seen. Conversely if I use the Forward button from the Dilbert page, it will take me back through the BBC and Engadget pages. If I were to launch an article from one of the posts, as I discussed last time, it will launch the tabbed browsing. At this point the back button will take you to the previous screen which would be the headline or newspaper view. The forward would then take you back to the tabbed browsing view.

Following the forward and back buttons, there is also another green arrow button. It points diagonally to the bottom right corner. When selected, this button will show where you are currently as well as your options for moving backward and forward. From here you can select one of the options from the list and go directly to that screen. This is followed by the RSS button which will only be active when you navigate to a post and view it as a web page. Really this is an Auto-discovery feature so it automatically seeks out new feeds. It can be handy if you want to add new feeds to FeedDemon but I will get into that in future posts.

The next icon is the favorites star. When you select this icon, FeedDemon will pull up your favorites list as you have it organized within Internet Explorer. It allows you to select one of the links that you have bookmarked and it will open as if in your regular browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc.). So basically you don’t have to leave FeedDemon in order to read anything on the web. You can also then use the Auto-Discovery RSS tool to subscribe to any feeds on that page. The last icon in this section of the toolbar creates additional tabs so that you can maintain one view and open another view. You can then easily switch between both simply by clicking on the tabs. Check out my last post for more info.

Next time I will finish out the Reports tool from Reading pane top tool bar.