Apr 27 2006
FeedDemon 2 owner
I am now the proud owner of a FeedDemon 2 license! I’ve been trying to decide on a feed reader recently and with so many cool online readers available I thought I didn’t need an offline version. But at the end of the day, nothing beats a full, desktop application for speed and functionality. And the great thing about FeedDemon is that it synchronises with NewsGator Online which means I can always stay up to date even if I don’t have FeedDemon installed. I’ve also been experimenting with some of the interesting FeedDemon features, like the keyword searches that use one of several blog search tools to present you with a feed based on what keyword you enter. I’ve set up three for microsoft, apple, and google for the time being and I’ll see how that goes before playing with it more.
I also picked FeedDemon because the parent company, NewsGator, seems to integrate nicely with other software too. They recently demoed their online service synching with IE7, but the coolest thing is that I can add any feed to my account by using the Google toolbar in Firefox. A subscribe button on the toolbar is highlighted every time I visit a site which has a feed available, and all it takes is a click on the toolbar and I’m redirected to the NewsGator site where I can choose what folder I want to keep the feed in – very handy indeed!
Some of my favourite technologies at the moment are RSS/Atom/ICal – I’m really enjoying how I can synchronise data across all sorts of platforms and applications. The only thing that would make it perfect is if I could subscribe to my Plaxo calendar through ICal – I’ve raised this as a request on their forums.
I use Netvibes as my home page, and I highly recommend you check it out. I’ve been using it for the last six months and it has grown from strength to strength. I have also tested out all of the other home page services available and none of them compare to Netvibes. I use it to aggregate all of my data in one easy to use view. I can access my Gmail, my Icals (not Plaxo yet), my del.icio.us bookmarks, as well as a handful of my favourite feeds, such as Digg, Engadget, and TechCrunch. If this is what Web 2.0 is all about, I love it!