Well, well, Whaddaya know! FeedDemon 2.8 Release Candidate 1 is out and it now contains ads. Wow. I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet with switching to RSS Bandit. Seriously, none of the applications on my laptop contains ads simply because: (a) they’re free or (b) I paid for them. FeedDemon used to be shareware i.e. free for 30 days and about $30 to register. I paid for FeedDemon back then and was ecstatic when they made it a free program because it freed me from having to pay for upgrades. Now, the author of FeedDemon, Nick Bradbury, feels the need to insert ads into this product because they need a source of revenue. That’s his prerogative. I’ll install FeedDemon on my Windows XP Pro SP3 virtual machine and see what the hubbub is about. In any case, I don’t think I’m going back to FeedDemon till I read about serious 
improvements in the stability & handling all sorts of feeds. So far, beyond some minor User Interface gripes, I’m liking my switch to RSS Bandit. Whenever I click “mark all feeds read”, it happens without locking up and forcing me to use Windows Task Manager to kill the process unlike *cough* FeedDemon *cough* 😀 On a serious note, it’s not all roses with RSS Bandit though. Here’s one of my pet peeves in the picture on the right.
Up next is Snagit 9.1. They made some changes visually and under the hood to Techsmith‘s Snagit (formerly Snag It!). Snagit feels snappier to use now and I appreciat
e all that the TechSmith team does. I love that the company blog and that’s why I’m actually going to help them out. Ever since I upgraded to Snagit 9.1 from version 9.0, I’ve noticed that whenever I try to shut my computer after a capture, Vista tells me Snagit is preventing the computer from restarting or shutting down. So, I finally gave my Windows Performance Information and Tools monitor a sneak peek to see if it could give me more info and sure enough, it confirmed that Snagit was holding up my computer. In the last incident, it held the computer hostage for 15 seconds. That’s not a lot of time, but for someone (me) who’s used to my rather rapid vista shutdown/sleep, this is rather irksome. I went through the event viewer and helpfully (I hope) pasted the entries regarding Snagit 9.1 issues into a .txt (although I chose “XML view” to make it easier on the eyes IMHO). I’ve sent their tech evangelist (Betsy Weber) an email regarding the shutdown issue and I hope they figure out what the underlying problem is.
There are some other weird performance issues with Snagit 9.1 and I’ll try to be clear in detailing them. One weird thing Snagit also does is whenever I’ve done editing my captures in Snagit Editor and want to save, the Snagit Editor window changes its color/environment/whatchamacallit to something really bizarre. It doesn’t change my computer to Vista Basic, but whatever it’s doing, it’s odd. Check it out:
. In any case, I’m about troubleshoot-ed out. Lol. I need to go cuddle with my husband. 🙂
