FeedDemon – Folder List Tool Bar

Today we will look at the options in the toolbar above the folder list. Similar to the capabilities that were built into the reading pane tool bar for customization, the Folder List Tool bar is also fully customizable.

When you are looking at your tool bar simply click the down arrow at the far right end. This will open the add buttons option. When you select this a new list of buttons will drop down allowing you to pick which buttons you like best. The buttons are activated and visible on the tool bar when there is a check mark next to them. The defaults are Subscribe, Views and Update all Feeds. For simplicity sake lets take a look at the functionality available from top to bottom.

The first button is subscribe and it has a drop down list with additional options. I will cover how to add subscriptions in a future post, but the options here include subscribe, find new feeds, new clippings folder, new watch and import feeds. The next button is Views which allows you to change how you see the folder tree. It also has a drop down list of options. The default is folder view, but you can change it to show just folders with unread items, or to show your feeds, or just feeds with unread items, just flagged items or based on a keyword search.

The next three buttons deal with marking as read. The first which looks like an envelope behind a sphere will mark just the feed as read. The next button, which looks like and envelope behind one folder, will mark the selected folder as read. The last button of this section is an envelope with multiple folders in front of it. This one marks all the feeds (and folders) as read.

The next four icons are a little bit confusing because they are all spheres and all look the same. There are minor differences that can help you tell them apart though. The first two are to move to the previous feed and to the next feed respectively. They have blue triangles at the bottom, integrated into the spheres. The sphere for the previous button has the triangle on the left side and the next button it is on the right side. The next two spheres are basically the same with the exception that they take you to either the previous unread item or the next unread item. The buttons are slightly different in that the triangles are now red instead of blue. As with before the Previous has the triangle on the left and the Next has the triangle on the right.

The spheres are followed by a page with a blue lightening bolt through it. This is the button that will take you to the next page. So if you are looking at a page and you select this button you will either go to the following page within the feed that you are looking at or you will move to the first page in the next feed. The last two buttons are basically different colored recycle buttons. The first one is blue and it will get updates for the folder that you have highlighted in your folder tree. This will only be active when you are in folder view. The last button is a redish-orange and will look for updates to all of your feeds.

So now that we know what all of the buttons do, we can add them into our toolbar. One drawback that I notice is that there are so many of them that to get them to all appear you have to expand your folder list to right which decreases the size of your reading pane. That being said you probably will find that there are some that you do not use and will probably remove from view anyway. I definitely found that there were some buttons that I did not use and ended up with just a few once I got used to using certain ones.

Next time I will look at the Show News Items function.