FeedDemon – Customize the Show News Items Toolbar

It comes as no surprise that the FeedDemon team has made the toolbar over the Show News Items column fully customizable. As with the other toolbars within FeedDemon there are several options for icons, buttons and boxes to help shape and mold your user experience to best fit your needs.

The default toolbar comes with the standard tools and is very minimalist. In order to start customizing you have to go to the end at the right side and select the small arrow pointing down. This will open the Add/Remove Buttons function. When you select this button a drop down list will appear with all of the available tools that you can add. The tools with checkmarks are those that are already available in the toolbar. You will activate or deactivate the tools by clicking them to add or remove the checkmarks.

There are a number of tools available from the list. The first one is Columns. When activated this will give you another drop down list that lets you manipulate the columns within the Show News Items Section. You can chose the columns that have the most benefit for you by selecting them from the list. These options include (but are certainly not limited to) Category, Source, Author, Date, Title, etc. It is difficult to have all of the columns selected simply due to scarcity of available real estate on the screen, but that is ok because there is some overlap in what information these columns represent.

The next item is Group by. This also has a drop down list and will help you to customize the view within the Show News Items section. Well not really the view, more like how the posts are sorted within the list. For instance if you select Received from the list of options then the posts will reorganize with the most recent on top. Similarly if you select Read from the list the posts will reorganize with the unread items on top. The next item is like a red circle with a line through it above over an open envelop. This icon allows you to hide (or unhide) all of the read items. The one thing that I did not like about this function is it does not hide the items as you read them. So once you read a post and move the next item the previous, read item, stays in the list. The next icon is a closed envelope with a magnifying glass. This will let you select whether the item descriptions, or post summaries, are shown with the headline in the Show News Items List. If you deactivate it then the list will condense to a simple list of headlines.

The next three icons have to do with marking the news item. The first is an open envelope that allows you to mark a news item as read. The second is a closed envelope and it allows you to mark an item as unread. The list item in this section is a red flag. Basically this allows you to mark a post with a flag. This allows you to easily mark a post so you can review it later or help you remember the posts that you want to do something with or save.

The next few icons help you to navigate between the posts. Each one looks like a sheet of paper, the differentiator is either a blue or a red arrow and which direction it points. The first one has a blue arrow pointing left and moves you to the previous news item. Similarly the next icon has a blue arrow pointing right and it moves you to the next news item. The next two have the red arrows, with the one pointing left taking you to the previous unread item in the list and the one pointing right taking you to the next unread item.

The next two tools were very interesting to me. It turns out that you can have FeedDemon read each post to you. When you select a post the first icon a red ball with a white arrow pointing right activates. If you select this icon, FeedDemon reads description associated with each post. It sounds a bit like Stephen Hawking. The next icon, the read ball with a white square is the stop button so you can stop it at any time.

The last tool is like a search box but it is really more like a keyword filter. So if there is a topic that you want to see more about, like Obama for instance, simply type it into the filter box and the list will resort to just show items on that topic. Once you enter a keyword into this box it will store it until you select [Clear this list]. At that point it will erase of of the keywords that you have entered.

That takes care of all of the buttons and tools available to help you customize your experience with the Show News Items section. There is one more thing about this toolbar that was surprising to me. In contrast to the other toolbars within FeedDemon when you select all of the tool from the list, this toolbar will wrap itself so that you can see all of the tools. It will also continue to wrap if you make the Show News Item section smaller. So it will take up two lines or three or however many are required to support the size of the section and the number of tools you have select. I found this to be a great feature and wish that it was part of the functionality for all of the sections.