Having used RSS Bandit for over 2 years I recently became a Google Reader convert, largely because of the ability to read it from any machine. What I missed was the offline stuff and I still needed to keep Bandit for internal feeds. So with the announcement from Newsgator that FeedDemon is now free I thought I'd give that a go.
I like the interface, it's clean. I kind of miss the three pane view of Bandit (UPDATE: I discovered you can have a three pane view in FeedDemon too), but then there's more space for the posts. What I really miss is the posts being marked read as I browse down the newspaper view (both Google Reader and Bandit have this feature), I have to keep remembering to mark the items read.
The alert message is attractively implemented and I think the fade is better than the toaster animation of Bandit that jerks my screen when my machine is busy. I like the ability to get alerts syndicated every 30 mins rather than when they arrive.
One of the killer features that kept me on Google Reader is sharing feeds I find interesting. These pipe straight into the RSS Reader widget on my blog. I can do the same with Newsgator online, and now I can do it through FeedDemon. I created a few categories for clippings - architecture, social software and notable; but what do I pipe into my blog. I can use Yahoo Pipes to join the feeds. I like that I can clip web URLs and not just feed items.
I don't like the fact that the toolbar for each feed (mark read, flag, delete, clip etc) is at the top of the feed. I only know what I want to do once I've read it! Doh!
In all other respects there doesn't seem to be much to choose between the three. I'll shun Google Reader for two weeks and see how I get on.
3 comments:
Interesting reading your thoughts on this, and it kind of makes me want to try Google Reader just to see how different/better or worse the sharing/tagging of feeds - I could really do with this feature, so will probably test drive it and see what I find. Ultimatley, my own intranet and offline capabilities might steer me more towards Feeddemon...
FYI, you can read/mark individual posts. There are a ton of single-keystroke shortcuts, and what I personally use is control-A to move to the next unread post which marks it as read. There are some definite difference between their design philosophy and RSS Bandit's, but after a couple of weeks I've migrated all my personal feeds to FeedDemon and am moving away from RSS Bandit.
Sorry, that should have been "control-space" to "read next".
As I said, there are a lot of shortcuts ...
Post a Comment