ANN: FeedDemon 2.6 RC1 Pre-Release

Although I haven't mentioned it here in my blog, FeedDemon 2.6 has been in beta for several weeks.  Now that the first release candidate of FeedDemon 2.6 is out, it's finally time to blog about it.

As you can see from the release notes, there are a lot of changes in v2.6.  Some of these changes - such as the vastly improved offline and prefetching features - are fairly substantial, but my primary focus with this release was to simplify FeedDemon, tidy it up, and generally make it faster and easier to use.

Under the hood, FeedDemon 2.6 offers some nice performance boosts.  In particular, FeedDemon's popular topics is an order of magnitude faster than it was.  Newspaper rendering is also noticeably faster, and the redesigned offline prefetch is far less CPU-intensive than before.

Information junkies will appreciate the new attention report, which provides an overview of the attention you're giving to each of your feeds (a great way to uncover feeds you can unsubscribe from).  And I think the new Firefox-inspired inline search toolbar (Ctrl+F) will be a hit not only with Firefox users, but also with Internet Explorer users who never escaped the confines of IE's "Find" dialog.

But the numerous UI improvements will be the most obvious changes - you'll find a ton of little UI tweaks in this release which add up to a much nicer experience.  I also spent quite a bit of time rethinking FeedDemon's newspapers to make them even more readable.  Among the improvements is a redesigned "headlines view," which enables rapidly scanning headlines for interesting articles.  Here's an example:

 

OK, that's enough of a sales pitch :)  If you'd like to give the FeedDemon 2.6 pre-release a try, just stop by the FeedDemon Beta Site to get it.

Comments

[Adam Hirsch]

Awesome Nick! I can't wait till the final release! I'm obviously a big FeedDemon fan and pusher. Nothing compares!

[Edddy]

My quick review:
* FD newspaper feel faster, much faster. Great!
* Nice prefetch options, but: Can you add the option to set the "prefetch images" and "prefetch Link" to all feeds at once? (I only want to prefetch images, but don't want to set it in all the feeds, too lazy :)
* The upgrade reset all the customization in the toolbar. Not too bad, but annoying.
* Update all feeds still show the (modal) newsgator window and hangs the app for a second. Not too bad, but annoying.
* New feed and pages interface: great!
* Everything else : great!

[Nick Bradbury]

Glad to hear you guys like the new release!

Edddy, to change prefetch settings for all feeds at once, go to the Feeds tab in the prefetch options dialog, then click on "All Subscriptions" and press the Options button. This will change the settings for all feeds in your subscriptions.

[Anne]

Eddy worte:

* The upgrade reset all the customization in the toolbar. Not too bad, but annoying.

It the same when I installed the new FD on my laptop at home. But it didn't when I installed it here at work, where I install it as administrator (sshhhh don't tell my colleagues), but use it as a user with limited rights on Windows XP.

[Anne]

"worte" has to be "wrote" of course ;-)

[Edddy]

Nick: Excellent!

[Edddy]

After a week of testing, it seams that the automatic prefetch after updating is not working. I hear the "ding", but the prefetched items are not there.
If I manually prefetch it works.

Downloading RC2 now (I will let you know if it is fixed)

[Nick Bradbury]

Eddy, can I ask you to post that in our support forums, along with any other details of the problem?

http://www.newsgator.com/forum/

Thanks,
Nick