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Nick Bradbury, founder of FeedDemon, gave readers a hint of what was in store for the early 2006 FeedDemon 2.0 release this week, via a screen shot of the shiny new UI and some details on his Weblog.
“With FeedDemon 2.0, weve focused a great deal on usability and tried to make reading RSS less geeky while at the same time make it even more useful for power users,” Bradbury said.
“FeedDemon 2.0 offers an overview page which lists: feeds with unread items, feeds with flagged items, feeds I pay the most attention to, feeds I pay the least attention to.
“So, you can see at a glance where your unread and flagged items are, and you can also see which feeds you read most often (and also least often, so you can quickly unsubscribe from feeds youre no longer reading).”
Comments on the blog post rushed in with praise, including “this will make FeedDemon perfect” and “I cant think of a better present from Saint Nick.”
Testers of the FeedDemon 1.6 beta, currently under way, were assured that their work was not in vain.
Though the UI will be fully overhauled in 2.0, the engine will be the same that is being tested for version 1.6.
FeedDemon 1.5 offered very limited synchronization, but the FeedDemon 1.6 beta was the first release that offered “true” synching, according to Bradbury.
The Denver, Colo., RSS platform company NewsGator Technologies acquired Bradbury Software—which put out FeedDemon and TopStyle (a CSS/xHTML editor for Windows)—in May of this year, along with its chief developer, Nick Bradbury, for an undisclosed amount.
At the time of the purchase, all existing FeedDemon (and TopStyle) customers were given a two-year NewsGator business standard subscription at no cost, including updates.
However, in July, Bradbury pitched the idea of changing FeedDemon to a subscription-based software in July, and received a deluge of negative feedback that led him to reconsider his choice, moving instead to allow FeedDemon customers to use it indefinitely even after their NewsGator subscriptions expire.
A beta of FeedDemon 2.0 should be available in mid-January, and will be released as a free upgrade from the current release.
“The bottom line is, you spend far less time clicking around and more time actually reading feeds. Plus, the UI has been given an overhaul to streamline and simplify the user experience,” said Bradbury.