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. Continue reading FeedDemon 2.8 RC1 is out, Snagit 9.1 is in and more
Tag: feeddemon
FeedDemon is getting the boot! Hello, RSS Bandit!
When FeedDemon was a paid application, I was a very happy customer. My feed subscriptions have been in the hundreds for a while now and lately, FeedDemon’s been getting the hiccups i.e. a polite way ofsaying it crashes within 10 minutes of usage. I am not kidding. Ever since the app became free, it’s like the developers have let it go to hell in a hand basket. It would help matters tremendously if it told me that some feed was trying to poison my computer or FeedDemon or do some sort of diagnostics because I’m getting sick of it. I tried out RSS Bandit before by Dare Obasanjo and it was not bad at all. In fact, the newest release of RSS Bandit supports Google Reader and my online Newsgator subscriptions. I’m also biased to RSS Bandit because Dare Obasanjo is a fellow Nigerian (probably a citizen or permanent resident of the USA now though) whose writing (& now code) I cannot get enough of. I will be downloading & installing RSS Bandit tonight because FeedDemon is just not worth the lost man-hours. The singular most annoying thing about FeedDemon crashing when I’m reading my feeds is that it doesn’t even let me resume my reading from where I left off. To be clear, all the feeds that were read before FeedDemon crashed? They automagically become unread when you restart FeedDemon. For someone who has hundreds of rss subscriptions, it has become a nightmare for me and I’ve stopped my daily reading because of this issue. I really hope they haven’t abandoned development of FeedDemon (they haven’t, but FeedDemon 2.8 is taking a long while) because I really had faith in this tool. Now, I’m just plain tired.
Update: Wow. I just installed it and man oh man! I’m really impressed. RSS Bandit has come a long way from when I first tried it. It feels snappy as hell! I’m not afraid to scroll through my feed list, wondering when (not if) FeedDemon will freeze on me before I get a chance to save my “state”. It imported my Newsgator Online feed list & didn’t crash! Can you feel my happiness? 🙂