Tracking Down Great Software For You!
I have been using the GreatNews RSS Reader for exactly two months and it has been pretty good. I wasn’t looking to switch to a new feed reader until I stumbled upon the cleverly named Feedreader. It looked so clean and simple that I felt like I had to give it a try…and of course it is free!
My first impression was very good because I was shocked at how simple, yet powerful, the software was. The more I started to play with it the more I started to like it.
There are a lot of great features that really stand out to me. First, In the View menu there are two options that say “Hide read articles” and “Hide read feeds”. I particularly like the “Hide read feeds” because it will only show you the feeds that have new articles that you need to read. This reduces the clutter from the screen especially if you subscribe to hundreds of different feeds.
The next feature that is my absolute favorite is the Smartfeed option. It will basically search the articles in your feed list for keywords that you specify or one of the other many options that you can search for. For those of you familiar with WinAmp then it kinda reminds me of the Smart Playlists feature:
What would a feed reader be without a cool alert slider? Yep, Feedreader has one of the nicest that I have seen and it notifies you each time there is a new story:
There is a lot more that Feedreader can do so make sure you checkout the Options that they have available (particularly the Advanced tab).
It does have a few things that I’m not too fond of but they are all something that I can deal with. The first thing is that there is no button to mark all of the feeds as read. You have to either right-click on the feed/folder and select “Mark as Read” or you can press Ctrl+R, but ideally there should be a button to do this.
The second thing that I don’t like is that they apparently removed the option to set the default update frequency and now you have to change it on each feed individually. They do that because they believe their IntelliSense option is better so they set it by default. It is designed to recognize how often a feed is typically updated and it will adjust the schedule accordingly. So if a site doesn’t update their feed for a few days at a time then it may only check for updates each day. If you don’t want to use this option then you can change it for each feed with choices as low as 1-minute update intervals.
This is going to be my feed reader from now on and hopefully the developer continues to add more features…all while keeping the interface as simple as it currently is.
| Update: | The developer of Feedreader commented below saying that you can easily change the update frequency of multiple feeds simultaneously: “You can change update period of all feeds if you go to feed management and then do Control A or select some feeds while holding down control. Now only archive size and update period is active. Change those and press Save. Voila – you have changed update period for multiple feeds.“ |
Hehe… My move was in the oposite direction. I used FeedReader for several months (till July), and I will never return to it, since I descovered GreatNews. My reasons (please tell me where I am not up-to-date and FeedReader do that) are:
- GreatNews allow you to set: notify me (with a popup window) about this feed, but not for this feed; FeedReader notify you about ALL feeds (when there is an update, of course). If you follow 50 feeds, you may want to be notified only about 10 feeds, otherwise you will have a forever-pop-up-window with news
- GreatNews has labels (which FeedReader did not had – I think – when I try it); in this way, I label my favorite topics (Web, IT, Humour, Design…) and I can find them whenever I want. Plus, on the time of cleaning feeds (they get hundreds in a month, if you follow sites as this), the labeled feeds are not deleted.
- GreatNews has the newspaper way of showing a feed; FeadReader?
- GreatNews is lighter in memory use, better than FeedReader
- Is there a browser with tabs inside FeedReader? GreatNews has one.
PS: I took a look at FeedReader website and I’ve seen in screenshots some tags, but do not seems so easy to use as with GreatNews
i have been trying the new Attensa 2.0 for outlook (which is now free), and is quite nice. on the one hand, u can use feature of outlook, like saved searches, and of course automatically sort the feeds according to ur reading habits.
but although they give u an options to tag items, u can only do it one at a time, and there is no option to correct them (spelling and such).
it’s funny they promote this is a tool for enterprises, when it is useful for private people 2.
now what i am missing is a reader that enable u to choose which feeds u want to export as opml.
I used to use FeedReader as my off-browser (not offline) feed reader but I have over 230 feeds that I check (a lot frequently, but most of them once a week or one a month). The thing I don’t like about the program it that it can’t handle that many feeds without slowing down and crashing each time. I admit I have been using version 2.xx and I can’t imagine v3 being that much better, but I didn’t like that about it. I use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks to check my daily feeds. Yup, I live in the stone age.
I was always a web drifter for the longest time, because I visited all my favorite news sites so often, that I really had no need for an RSS feed aggregator, but now that I follow even more, I’ve been convinced to the purpose of their inclusion in my use, while surfing the web.
This definitely looks like something I would consider switching from the recently updated Google Reader for. I personally chose Google Reader, because it has many of the functions that I want in an RSS reader, and also is web-based, which is a huge deal for me, because I’m constantly switching from computer to computer.
But this program, looks like it could be something I’d be interested in installing on my USB Drive, which also consequently follows me everywhere I go, unconditionally.
The feature, that is convincing me to switch is the pop-up feature, which notifies you when the latest content has been published to the web. A feature I love, because I love to stay up to the minute on my news. And this auto-notifies me, without me having to be looking through my RSS feed reader.
No, it doesn’t let you selectively choose which ones to include in the popup but I never choose to read a site that I need that option.
It doesn’t have the label option exactly, but it does have the Smartfeeds which seems to be much more powerful than the labels. The Smartfeeds is probably my favorite feature.
Feedreader seems to use much less memory for me…typically around 4MB while opened and 2MB while minimized.
The browser does not have tabs but it does have an internal browser that is really easy to use. I actually disabled the tabs in GreatNews because if I wanted the page opened in a tabbed browser I would have it open in Firefox.
The notifier is really nice and I never understood why Google didn’t setup the Google Reader to at least automatically refresh like GMail does. They should also come out with a notifier that does GMail, Google Calender, and Google Reader all in one. I’m sure a lot of people would love that.
Not much for feed readers, but do like the one that is built into Flock, which suits my needs better than Firefox’s Live Bookmarks.
Yes, Flock’s is pretty awesome as well but it still had some bugs in it the last time I played with it. Once they get around to Flock 1.0 then I am sure that will be one of “THE” feed readers to use. They were very smart for developing that feature because that is probably one of the most requested things for Firefox.
Have been using Abilon a long time. Feedreader is really good and feature intensive. Nice to have a good free software.
However, I’ve started reading all my news of Netvibes itself now, so stopped the need for offline readers
Those are my questions too: why Google do not extend GTalk to notify about Reader & Calendar also? Let’s hope soon our request will be read & implemented.
Hi!
I’m the guy behind Feedreader. Thanks for review
. There are two things I’d like to clarify. First: There is more menu from where you can mark all news read in active feed. Ok, its not separate button but it’s better than popup.
Second : you can change update period of all feeds if you go to feed management and then do Control A or select some feeds while holding down control. Now only archive size and update period is active. Change those and press Save. Voila – you have changed update period for multiple feeds.
I have been using that as well but it would be nice to have a separate button near the “Next Unread” button. It is just something that I do so frequently so I have just been getting used to using the Ctrl R.
You know, I could have sworn that I tried that…but sure enough I went back and it worked! I updated the post accordingly.
Thanks for developing such a great piece of software. I’m not sure how often you update it but it is nearly perfect in my opinion.
I have been using FeedReader and love it. Just one problem, that I would love to move the database from it’s default location under the OS, to another partition where I keep all of my data for backup purposes. I have had to reinstall windows and feedreader and lost all of my feed downloads.
it’s a great news reader
…if only there was a possibility to use the mozilla engine
It would be cool if it could use the Mozilla engine but I don’t think I have come across a feed reader that does. They all seem to use Internet Explorer which is why I typically set all of the links to open in an external browser.
I like feedreader, have been using it for several years but now the smartfeed feature is not strong enough. I would like to be able to combine .AND. and .OR. rules. Now it “only” offers the possibilitie of AND or OR for all rules..