FeedDemon – Tools Menu (Options Vol.3)

With all the options packed into FeedDemon, hopefully we will be able to finish out our discussion today. So as I pointed out yesterday when you select the options from the list and the Options window opens the default is the General options which we discussed yesterday.

There are however several tabs across the top. The next one after the General tab is the Reading Tab. This is the options for the reading pane and the Newspaper views. There are three headings on this tab, one for Reading, one for News Item List and the last for Newspaper. Under the Reading options you can set when the posts will be marked as read, such as when the feed changes or when you change to a new Newspaper page. Under the News item list you can set the option to be able to move to the next unread item with the spacebar and you can set how many lines each post description has with it. Under the Newspaper section you can optimize for low bandwidth, which means FeedDemon will remove the images. You can also enable the embedded content from you posts. Finally you can set the number of posts that you want to appear on each Newspaper page.

The next tab is the Browsing tab. From here you can tell FeedDemon if you want to open external links in your default browser instead of FeedDemon. You can also setup what will happen when you select an item, even if the description is empty. On the bottom section the options pertain to the tabbed browsing function. The options available include opening new browser windows as tabs, loading the tabs in the background and having FeedDemon remember your tabs when you leave FeedDemon so that they are available when you open it next time.

The next tab is for Desktop Alerts. These are little pop-ups that let you know when new feeds have arrived. You can turn these off or set the timing for how often they appear. You can also set them up to appear all the time or only when you have FeedDemon minimized. The other thing you can set in this tab is whether and when the FeedDemon icon will show in the system tray. You can also have FeedDemon minimize to the system tray rather then closing.

The last tab is the Appearance tab. Through this tab you have many options to change the appearance of FeedDemon. You can change the user interface from Office 11, which follows the Windows theme, or you can chose classic which basically changes the menu or toolbar edges from rounded to square. You can also change the colors for the main characteristics within FeedDemon. These include Unread items, Flagged items, Alternate Rows, Descriptions and Subscriptions. The last thing that you can control is the fonts. You can change the News Item Fonts as well as the Newspaper fonts. There is also an option to increase the size of the fonts in the Newspaper view.

Next time we will check out the toolbar over the folder list.