FeedDemon - Review

Ratings

* Ease of Use: 4

* User Interface: 4

* Performs as Described: 3

* Overall: 4

Overall I found FeedDemon to be a tool that performed as expected for the most part and made it very easy for me to review and manage my subscriptions. There were a few things that did not work as I expected but for the most part everything did work and it worked well. I really liked having the ability to customize my view to match my preferences and enrich my user experience by including things that I actually use in the tool-bars versus a bunch of icons that just take up space. Check out the user guides that I have posted over the past few months for more information. Here is a brief list of some of the Pros and Cons for FeedDemon:

Pros

1. FeedDemon has an internal browser function, with tabbed browsing, that allows you to go to the website of any post or feed as well as type in your own URL s or visit websites from your favourites list in your default web browser. You only have to have one tool open which consumes less resources and is easier to manage.
2. FeedStation, a built in pod catcher, is a nice tool if you receive audio or video in your feeds. It allows you to download the media from the web and view or hear it any time in your favourite media player.
3. Prefetching gives you the ability to work off-line and still be able to view all of the content for the feeds (including images) as well as the destinations for any links that are included in the feeds. Meaning you can visit external links without an internet connection because it downloads all the content to your computer.
4. The Clippings folders allow you to create a place to hold and categorize articles and posts that you want to keep for reading later, re-reading or save for some other purpose.
5. You can set-up your own RSS Feed that you can share with your friends, teachers, associates, really anyone you want. This is simple to set-up as a part of your clippings folder(s) set-up and it is easy to use.
6. Watches & Search - Watches provide you with a personalized feed based on keywords that you enter. Search will look through all of your subscriptions to return the topic that you put in.
7. Many options are available to customize your view and it is easy to use.
8. Recommended Feeds are feeds that FeedDemon offers as possible feeds for you to import and offers numerous topics from both mainstream and obscure sources.
9. Importing from another service is very easy and can be accomplished by importing the OPML document or for some services FeedDemon can import your feeds through a direct link, like for Bloglines.
10. Desktop alerts can be set-up and configured to let you know when new posts are discovered which allows you to run FeedDemon in the background and stay up to date.
11. You have full control over your feeds; setting the frequency with which they search for new posts, you can test drive a feed setting it to auto-delete after a certain number of days, you can even set-up FeedDemon to auto-delete any feeds that stop sending out posts or decreasing in frequency below a daily output that you select.
12. Adding feeds is quick and easy. You have several options, entry of the URL for the main page of the site that you want to start receiving posts from, copy and paste the actual URL for the feed, or you can do a keyword search.
13. Auto-discovery of feeds helps you to find feeds that you want to add to your subscriptions simply by analysing any site that you navigate to in the browser view and altering you to RSS feeds that are available with an icon that you can add to your tool-bar.
14. The tool-bars are all highly customizable with numerous icons that you can add or remove to provide easy access to the tools that you use most and make your user experience better.
15. Show News Items allows you to see a list of posts like an email inbox, when you select a post it contents will be shown in the viewing pane and it can show the post itself or the actual web page for the post.
16. FeedDemon can be set-up to work well with any kind of connection speeds
17. The Panic Button is a wonderful tool that can reduce the number of unread items to a reasonable level based on the criteria you set.
18. The Cleanup Wizard is another nice tool that will eliminate old posts based on criteria that you enter and will only focus on areas that you tell it to, such as Subscriptions only, or Subscriptions and Watches, etc.


Cons

1. The initial set-up of feeds in FeedStation is not automatic and can be complex, involving switching between FeedDemon and FeedStation in order to configure the feed.
2. Synchronization of the Clippings folders does not always work as expected and can be complicated if you are using multiple computers and multiple instances of FeedDemon
3. Watches only provide you with posts or articles that were delivered in one of your subscriptions, they do not provide any additional information from other news sources.
4. Keyword view is not intuitive an will only review the names of the feeds that you have subscribed to in search of the keyword that you entered. It will now show you which feeds have posts related to your keyword view.
5. FeedDemon will not allow you to change the view for watches or for clippings, this ability to customize is only available for the Subscriptions (feeds).
6. The Show News Items tool takes up valuable real estate on the screen decreasing the size of the viewing pane. This can be corrected, but you will loose the view of your subscription list.
7. You will notice that there are a plethora of icons available, many of which do essentially the same thing with a minor tweak, but they still look the same. Also activating them all will use the entire space and in many instances increase the tool-bar size to another line, taking up viewing space.
8. As with the NewsGator tools, the Help is high level and does not describe everything. They do a better job here with descriptions and tutorials, but again the best help is found in the NewsGator Forums.
9. The Reporting tools do not synchronize with the on-line version and as such may not contain all of your reading history if you use other tools like NewsGator Online or NewsGator Inbox.

NewsGator Inbox - Review

Ratings

• Ease of Use: 3

• User Interface: 4

• Performs as Described: 2

• Overall: 3

Overall I found NewsGator Inbox to be a tool that performed as expected for the most part and made it very easy for me to review and manage my posts in an environment where it is difficult to download full-up programs and where too much internet usage can draw unwanted attention, specifically at work. There were a few things that did not work as I expected but I liked the integration with Microsoft Outlook and the ability to customize my view to match my preferences pretty closely. Check out the user guides that I have posted over the past few months for more information. Here is a brief list of some of the Pros and Cons for NewsGator Inbox:

Pros
1. NewsGator Inbox is an add-on or plug-in and not a full up desktop program
2. It looks and feels just like Outlook adding to ease of use. It even uses some of the same tools, such as .pst files in order to support the configuration of the folders.
3. Since Outlook has the ability to show web content without launching a web browser, there is added capability and increased usability without launching additional programs.
4. Although the Help function is limited, there is additional help available through the NewsGator Forums. Although going to them automatically launches your default browser rather then utilizing the web tools within Outlook, there is a wealth of knowledge in the forums that is search-able and you can ask question and receive answers from the NewsGator team and other users.
5. Post to Blog tool allows you to post to links, quotes or new compositions to your blog, in both draft or published form, from within NewsGator Inbox. It is limited though (see con 7 below).
6. The NewsPage feature is fully customizable and provides you with a headline view, much like a newspaper, that you can use to peruse your feeds while determining which posts you would like to read further.
7. You can use NewsGator Inbox to create your own RSS feed where you become the editor, selecting stories and post that you want to share with your friends. Supports multiple RSS feeds so you can create more then one and is based on the folder setup, so for each folder that you enable the RSS Feed capability it will automatically distribute the feed to your friends.
8. You can setup the wait time after Outlook start-up before the update tool will run, helping to speedup start times.
9. There is a tool to eliminate duplicate clippings (I wish that it would eliminate duplicates throughout the NewsGator Inbox, and furthermore would eliminate duplicates that are sited from the same source, such as AP Articles that are quoted by both MSNBC and CNN for example). Overall very helpful for reducing duplication and removing clutter.
10. The Subscription Management tool scrubs the unread items based on your defined criteria to reduce the overwhelming number of RSS Feed posts distributed every day!
11. Cleanup wizard is very good at eliminating old posts that you have not marked as keepers, through archiving or deletion. This reduces the amount of space that they take up and keeps your inbox clean. It even reminds you to run it.
12. Smart Feeds, feed discovery and recommended feeds can help you find feeds and integrate them into NewsGator inbox fast and easily through url and keyword searches. However is not consistent with the functionality of the Smart Feeds found in the NewGator Online version
13. Test-Drive and Auto-Deletion give you an opportunity to try new feeds for a while without having to delete them later if you do not like them. Also if a feed stops providing posts regularly or stops all together the feed can be deleted automatically without intervention from you which keeps your Inbox nice and tidy.

Cons
1. Running options in NewsGator Inbox will consume all of the resources for Outlook and will effectively lock you out of Outlook until it completes the action.
2. Running the update function consumes a significant amount of memory and will affect the usability of other programs that you have running
3. NewGator Inbox will increase the Outlook start-up time because it is one more thing that Outlook has to open before opening.
4. Since NewsGator Inbox is linked to another program, Microsoft Outlook, it has a lagging update schedule and is dependent upon Outlook updates which can have a negative affect on the performance of the add-on.
5. Some aspects of the tool can conflict with anti-virus software, such as links within messages.
6. Help is offered, but it is very high level and usually only provides basic descriptions
7. Post to blog only supports a few of the most popular online blog services. I was only able to get it to work with Wordpress and LiveJournal. Also it will not create new categories if you do not already have them created within your Blog.
8. Synchronization tool uses extra resources that will slow overall computer operation
9. Reports other then “My Attention Report” were not functional and the analysis tools do not synchronize with any of the other NewsGator tools so you do not get an overall view if you utilize other tools or other computers.
10. As with the reports, some of the tools were not functional
11. Synchronization was not always working properly, for instance folders deleted in another NewsGator tool (like online or FeedDemon) do not always update in NewsGator Inbox as deleted.