FeedDemon – Views

As with the majority of tools within FeedDemon, you have full control over your views. What I mean is that you have the ability to change how you see your Folder Tree or Subscriptions list. There are a couple of ways to access the different views that are available. There is the standard functionality where you go to View and then highlight ‘Views’ which will present you with a drop down list of options. The other way to see your options is to activate the Views tool on the Folder List section toolbar.

The default view is the Folder View. This maintains the traditional folder tree layout with the top level folder called Subscriptions and is followed by each of the folders that you have created to hold your feeds. To see the feeds in each folder you have to expand the folder by clicking on the arrow to the left of the folder. All of the folders will be visible in this view. The second option would be a modified Folder View. It will be the same as the Folder View except that it will only have folders listed that have unread items in them. In either view, each of the folders will indicate the number of unread items next to the folder name.

The next choice changes views a little bit. Rather then displaying all the folders you have in your folder tree, this option will go one level lower and displays each feed for which you are a subscriber. This is followed by a choice to only show feeds that have unread items. So this option decreases the number of feeds listed to simply include only those with unread posts. This is followed by an option to filter on feeds that have flagged posts. Once selected, this option will show only the feeds that have a post that you have marked as flagged. As with the folder views, regardless of view selected, each of the feeds will indicate the number of unread items next to the feed name.

The last option is to do a keyword view. This is not as intuitive as you might think. I was expecting it to be like the watch tool and provide all the feeds for whatever keyword I enter. This was not the case however. What it really does is just look through the names of your feeds for the keyword that you enter. For instance if I want to see just the BBC feed, I would enter BBC in the keyword search. FeedDemon would then put all of the feeds that have BBC in the title in the folder tree or subscription list for me to review. I can see practical application for this if you have a large number of subscriptions and you would quickly like to navigate to a certain feed without manually searching. However it seems like it would be more powerful if it were more like a keyword search that yielded all of the feeds that have that particular keyword within one of the posts.

A couple of items thing to note: regardless of the view that you pick you will still see your feeds on top, then your watches and then your clippings. Also none of the views actually change how you see your watches or your clippings. As I have stated throughout this post, no matter which view you pick, the feeds or folders with unread items will always be indicated by bold lettering and the number of unread items listed to the right of the name. Lastly any feeds or folders that have flagged items will always change the feed or folder name to appear in red rather then black.

Next time we will look at setting up watches.