FeedDemon – Show News Items

As we discussed in the previous post about Customizing the Reading Pane toolbar, the Show News Items basically gives FeedDemon more of an email feel. To activate the Show News Items function you can simply select the icon once you have activated it to the Reading Pane toolbar. Keep in mind that this icon will be active when you have a feed selected in the folder tree. Another way to activate it is through the View Menu. As we talked about in a previous post, you can select it from the menu list.

Once you have selected the Show News Items a new list will appear in FeedDemon. It will appear between the folder list and the reading pane and will look a lot like an email list, like in Outlook or Thunderbird. The list will contain all of the posts from within the folder that you have selected in the folder tree. The unread items are easily distinguishable because they are bolded in the list. Once you move to the next item the previous will automatically move to read.

So this has some obvious pros and cons. The first thing that could be either a pro or a con is that it takes up space on the FeedDemon window. Since screen space can be a premium activating this can be a con in that there is less space available to show the posts when you select one and go to its website. There are ways around this though because you can easily go back to the View Menu and remove the selection that shows your subscriptions (aka: the folder tree). This makes the Show News Items the far left column and frees up some real estate so you can see the web pages without having to scroll.

So the way that Show News Items list interacts with the reading pane for me started out as a con, but then became a pro. At first when you are using the list and scrolling through the new posts, the reading pane provides the regular reading pane Newspaper view just with one Headline at a time. When I began using it, I really did not see this as a pro for FeedDemon, however as I began to use it more I found that once you select one of the posts the Reading Pane view will show the post’s website. Now since the web page view is activated, when you scroll through the list the Reading Pane shows the web page for each post. Once I figured this out, it became a pro for me. Especially when scrolling through posts that are not lengthy or include lots of photos.

Next time I will go over how to customize the toolbar, because as with everything in FeedDemon, you can make it your own.