FeedDemon 2.5: Offline Doesn't Mean Unavailable

Watch a screencast of FeedDemon 2.5's offline features

FeedDemon's support for offline reading isn't something every customer uses, but those that need it absolutely love it. And they're going to love FeedDemon 2.5 even more, because it adds a host of new features aimed at making offline reading even better.

The most obvious addition is the ability to prefetch unread items. This handy feature - which is found under the "File" menu - downloads web pages and images that are linked in your unread items, making them available even when you're not connected.

This is especially nice if you're subscribed to feeds such as Engadget which contain a lot of images. In the past, viewing these feeds offline meant seeing broken red X's where the images were supposed to be, but FeedDemon's prefetching solves this problem. Here's a screenshot which shows how Engadget looks when FeedDemon 2.5 is offline (hint: it looks exactly the same as it does when you're online).

When you're working offline, links which haven't been prefetched have a red underline to let you know they're not available. Clicking a link that has been prefetched shows the offline copy of the linked page.

In addition to these features, there are a number of smaller improvements that add up to make FeedDemon's offline support far better than it was (and it was already pretty good). If your current feed reader won't work without an Internet connection, why not give FeedDemon 2.5 a try?

Comments

[Jan]

And now Google Gears...

[Tris Hussey]

Tried this yesterday on the ferry. Worked great. I couldn't get Gears to install on my Vista box ... so this is better for me.

I'm thinking that although I liked GR for a while, the new FD2.5 has improved skimmability (which is my big thing).

[Steve Richards]

This looks really promising, unfortunately its currently taking 100% CPU. if I restart it then it skips through the feeds its already got offline and then downloads a few % points more before going 100% CPU again

[Nick Bradbury]

Steve, FeedDemon's prefetch can be fairly resource intensive since it's downloading so many item, but it shouldn't peg the CPU that much (in my case, the highest it reached was 47%).

If this happens consistently, there are a couple of things you might want to try:

1. In FeedDemon's options, click the "Connection" button, then reduce the max connections allowed.

2. Also in FeedDemon's options, click the "Prefetch" button, then reduce the number of links to download per item.

Both of these will reduce the amount of information being retrieved. If neither of those help, could I ask you to post in the FeedDemon Support Forum at http://www.newsgator.com/FORUM/Forum14-1.aspx ?