Nick Bradbury

ANN: FeedDemon 3.0 Beta 4 with Google Reader Synchronization

It has been fun watching the news spread about the latest FeedDemon 3.0 Beta even though I never “officially” announced it.  It started with a couple tweets from me, then spread to Twitter at large and on to web sites like Digital Inspiration, Shooting at Bubbles and Lifehacker.

So, I guess I should make it official now: the first beta of FeedDemon 3.0 with Google Reader synchronization is now available from the FeedDemon Beta Site.  If you're new to FeedDemon, you'll be given a choice between NewsGator and Google Reader synchronization at startup.  If you're already synching with NewsGator, you can convert to Google Reader by selecting Tools | Synchronization Options | Advanced and clicking “Convert Now.”

Since this is a beta release, it comes with the usual “use at your own risk” warning.  I try to make my beta releases very reliable, but there’s still a good chance you’ll encounter a hair-raising bug or two, so please don’t download this unless you’re comfortable using unfinished software.

I should also add that Google Reader synchronization is still a work in progress.  I’ve been using it for several weeks and overall it has worked very well, but there are some missing pieces.  In particular:

1. Tags you add in FeedDemon are synched with Google Reader, but tags you add in Google Reader won’t always sync back to FeedDemon.
2. If you convert from NewsGator synching to Google Reader synching, flags/tags you add to items that existed prior to the conversion may not sync with Google Reader.
3. If you have thousands of unread items in Google Reader, FeedDemon will not download them all.  This isn’t actually a bug – I do this on purpose, primarily because I couldn’t justify consuming so much of someone else’s bandwidth to download items you’ll most likely never read.  If you have a ton of old, unread items in Google Reader, I recommend selecting “Mark all Read” to be free of them :)

The first two issues are ones I’m actively working on, and my goal is to have them resolved prior to the final release of FeedDemon 3.0.

PS: If you follow me on Twitter, please understand that I can’t provide tech support on Twitter (I’ve tried, but it just doesn’t work).  Our support forums are a much better place to report problems and ask questions!

Making Short URLs Suck Less

All this chatter about how short URLs suck makes me want to remind folks about FeedDemon 3.0’s “short URL preview,” which I blogged about a few months back.

As the screenshot below illustrates, just mouse over a short URL to see a balloon tip containing the actual URL it points to:

  

A even better example of this feature can be found in this excellent post from Digital Inspiration, which explains why FeedDemon 3.0 is “an almost perfect Twitter client.”

Anti-Virus Software Hates Us

One of the things I despise about Windows is how much time developers have to spend working around problems in third-party firewall and anti-virus software.

Case in point: I’m seeing quite a few error reports about the new FeedDemon 3.0 beta that are caused by AV software locking files that FeedDemon is trying to access.  Many AV programs monitor the file system for changed files, and when they find one, they scan it for viruses – temporarily locking it in the process.  This has always been a problem, but it’s now an even bigger problem since FeedDemon stores your feed content in a single SQLite database file.  Every time that database file changes, your AV software scans it to make sure it's not infected.

In some cases this causes file permission errors when FeedDemon tries to access its database, but more often than not it simply slows FeedDemon down since it has to wait for the file lock to be released.

Most people report that the new FeedDemon is a lot faster than previous versions, so if you’re finding it slower, chances are your AV software is the culprit.

The good news is that you can probably stop this from happening.  FeedDemon’s database uses the file extension .FDB, so if your AV software has an “exclusions” list, try adding the file extension .FDB to it.  If you can’t do that, see if you can add FeedDemon’s cache folder (File | Manage Cache) to its list of excluded folders.  Several customers who have done this have reported dramatic speed increases.

Of course, I can’t expect every FeedDemon customer to do this, so I’m looking into ways to work around these issues.  But in the meantime, give it a shot, and reply here if it makes a difference.