FeedDemonBy far my favourite way to read RSS feeds is using FeedDemon on my laptop. While there tons to love in FeedDemon, there are a few things that I wish were a little different, and rather than submit them to the NewsGator newsgroup where they might get lost under the deluge of feature requests, I thought I’d outline my feedback right here on my blog. NewsGator has shown that they’re on top of what’s being said about their products in the blogosphere!

So here are the things I’ve noticed that I think could use a little work:

Bug: The Unread Folder View sometimes does not show all feeds with unread items in them. I think this happens when FeedDemon updates its feeds; the total unread number for the folder containing the feeds updates, but the feeds that went from no unread items to greater than one unread item don’t automatically show up. Quickly choosing the (all) Folder View then back to the Unread Folder View displays the missing feeds.

Usability issue: Another issue I’ve found is when a feed update occurs while I’m reading a feed in “river of news” mode, (i.e. click on the feed’s title and all unread posts are showing), if new posts show up for the feed I’m viewing, it’s not made immediately clear to me that I’m not seeing everything available for that feed. Obviously clicking the feed title again will show the new stuff that just showed up, but the problem is that if I don’t notice an update has occurred, I will blindly press the hotkey to mark everything in my feed as read, thinking that I’ve actually read everything in the feed when I haven’t. So then I’ve just marked posts as read that I actually haven’t even yet seen. I’m not sure what the solution to this is - I hate dialog boxes, but maybe that’s the way to go - if you happen to be reading a feed in “river of news” mode and that feed is updated, maybe a dialog box needs to notify you that you’re not seeing everything for that feed. Actually, a better alternative might be to ensure that pressing the “mark feed as read” hotkey only marks items read that have actually been displayed on the screen. I’m sure this is the more difficult solution, but it’s definitely the most user-friendly approach.

Feature request: Hotkey support. For better or worse, I’ve come to know and love the hotkeys used by Gmail and (gasp!) Bloglines… and for that matter, Google Reader. It drives me crazy that I need to hold down modifier keys to do almost anything in FeedDemon. I want to be able to move from feed to feed with the “J” and “K” buttons, instead of “Ctrl-Space” or some other multi-key combination. Ideally, the focus would remain on the reading pane even when using the hotkeys, so that for example I could press “J” to move to the next feed, and use the space bar to page down as I read, then hit “J” to move to the next item. (Like how it works in Gmail, etc.)

Feature request: As a future enhancement I’d love it to see Nick take a page out of Bloglines’ book and implement the ability to scroll between posts in the “river of news” view. I prefer reading one document top-to-bottom like this, but it drives me crazy that I can’t easily skip a long article that I’m not interested in - I have to scroll down, down, down. I should be able to jump to the next article with one keystroke. Like “J”! :-) Even better, it would be great if I had the option of marking each post that I put the focus on as read as I arrive at it (or leave it), similar to how the new Google Reader does it.

Nick and the rest of the NewsGator team, please take my feedback as it was intended - I’m hoping to add value to the product and help steer it in a direction that will benefit all users (as well as myself). And for anyone else that has read this far and doesn’t understand how great FeedDemon is, and why you really should pony up and pay for a great news agreggator, take my word for it - FeedDemon is awesome, and combined with NewsGator’s synchronization engine is simply unbeatable. And Nick Bradbury’s blog (he’s the creator of FeedDemon) is my favourite developer-written blog. He writes for the rest of us, while still managing to discuss the challenges he faces as a coder, while striking that hard to find balance between topic-specific posts, and regular life / family stories.

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