FeedDemon Revisited

Back in the good old days… say… a couple years ago, I evaluated a bunch of feed readers, and gladly plopped down my $30 for a registered, paid version of FeedDemon. I used it for several months, then Google Reader came along, I tried it out, switched back and forth a few times, but I eventually settled on Google’s online offering. It worked well, was accessible from anywhere, and had a decent mobile offering that works on my Blackberry.

Since then, a few things have changed. FeedDemon was purchased by Newsgator, which means that it can synchronize between multiple computers and other products. Nick Bradbury, the primary developer, has continued to add new features to FeedDemon in response to customer requests. And last month, Newsgator released all of their client products for free.

I decided to give FeedDemon another shot, and Friday morning I downloaded and installed the client on my PC at work. I also installed Newsgator Go! which is the mobile version of their aggregator.

I must say I’m impressed. Using keyboard navigation in the FeedDemon client, I can get through feeds just as quick as with Google Reader. You can “clip” and article which saves a full-text copy locally as well as (optionally) synchronizing the clipped items across multiple PCs. Being a “fat client” app there are some nice GUI features that aren’t yet implemented on web-based readers. The only downside is that it seems to be a bit harder to quickly get through feeds on their mobile reader.

For now, I’m switching to FeedDemon and the Newsgator synch. I love the UI and it’s not any slower than Google. Once I spend more time mobile I’ll be able to better evaluate the BlackBerry version.