FeedDemon - Free Desktop Feed Reader
I first wrote about FeedDemon almost 4 years ago. All the nice things I said then still apply. In those 4 years, the app has only gotten better, with improvements for subscribing to podcasts, searching for news, and pre-caching Web pages for offline reading among the many enhancements of active development in that time. Now instead of buying the feed reader I use every day, you can download it for free. Newsgator, the company behind FeedDemon recently annouced they plan to give away FeedDemon, Newsgator Inbox 3.0, and Mac feed reader NetNewsWire.
If you're currently using live bookmarking in Firefox, reading feeds in IE, or even using a Web based feed reading solution, I strongly encourage you to drop what you're doing, import your feeds into FeedDemon and give it a try. Why? There's tons of stuff you simply can't get from a Web app like Google Reader or Bloglines. For instance:
- You can read the feed, view images, and the Web pages it links to without being connected to the Web.
- You can create search feeds of your feeds, to bubble the important stuff to the top (this saves me tons of time)
- FeedDemon is fast - far faster than any Web based reader I've tried and I have accounts with several. The name isn't cribbed from Speed Demon for no reason.
- Managing podcast and video blogs with FeedDemon is awesome, and it doesn't care whether you have an iPod or a Zune
- FeedDemon makes it easy to blog stuff you find through desktop tools, skipping the copy and paste steps required by online feed readers
- You could dump your browser and use FeedDemon in place of IE or Firefox (I don't, but it does work).
Nick Bradbury, developer of FeedDemon has a much more comprehensive list of reasons FeedDemon beats your Web feed reader. Sure he's biased, but he's also right. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]