RSS Bandit is probably one of the most well-known desktop feed readers available, and it just got a nice overhaul. The new RSS Bandit 1.5 has all sorts of cool new stuff, but the thing I found most interesting with it is the comment watching feature. With it you’re able to read all of the comments currently available on a site right there in RSS Bandit.
In order for it to work the feed will need to be setup with providing the number of comments, which ours currently doesn’t do, but once that is done the readers of your site will surely reap the benefits. In the screenshot above you can see what the comment tracking looks like, and if you come across a post that you want to monitor for new comments all you have to do is right-click and select “Watch Comments”. Every time a new comment is made you’ll be notified…can’t get much easier than that!
Here is a list of other features that you’ll find in this release, along with links that explains each of them in a little more detail:
- Comment Watching
- Items marked as read when viewed in the Newspaper
- Date-based grouping in the list view
- Options for opening tabs in the background
- Favicons
- Enclosures treated as attachments
- Certain user defined enclosures treated as podcasts including adding to playlists in iTunes and Windows media player
- Remembering application state on restart – This will work similar to the Session Saver extension in Firefox in that open tabs and the tree view state will be remembered on restart
- Revamping the search feature – We’ve moved the implementation of feed search to Lucene.Net from our custom feed search implementation which should make searches faster and provide richer search options.
- Support for Atom Threading Extensions
- Easily configurable keyboard shortcuts – Just right-click when hovering over the toolbar menu and choose “Customize”.
I tried out RSS Bandit and it is one of the best feed readers that I have used. The only thing that holds me back from using it as my own feed reader is that there is no easy way to switch from feed to feed. I need a shortcut that will take me from one unread feed to another, and the only option that it currently has is a shortcut to go from one unread item to another. Some of my feeds I subscribe to will have 10 to 20 new posts each time I view them, and I don’t want to go from item to item in order to get to the next feed. I could always just click on the next feed with my mouse, but that could get tedious with more than 200 feeds to go through.
RSS Bandit is an open source feed reader so it won’t cost you a penny, which is something that attracts a lot of users. So play with it a little, see if you like it, and the worst thing that could happen is you would uninstall it.
RSS Bandit Homepage (Download Mirror for RSS Bandit 1.5.0.10)
I was a great fan of FeedDemon, but unfortuantely I hate paid software. I’ll surely check out RSS Bandit
RSS Bandit is my favorite desktop reader. What a great idea integrating comment tacking!
I’ve never seen this feature in an RSS reader (desktop or Web-based). It seems like a no-brainer. Hopefully, others will follow RSS Bandit’s lead.
I’m still waiting for a RSS reader based on Firefox instead of the usual (weak) IE engine. The newsreaders extensions for Firefox aren’t quite as good as one could expect…
With commenting become an integral part of many sites I’m sure other feed readers will follow RSS Bandit’s lead. It has a clean interface and is very well put together…it just needs to get some additional shortcuts before I can use it as my primary feed reader.
For a long time I felt the same way as you do, but now I think Firefox is better off without a built-in feed reader. I doubt they would add many of the features power users would love (such as the comment tracking in RSS Bandit) and normal users are probably content with having an online RSS reader. That’s just my thought though.
I’ve used RSS Bandit for about a year although not yet updated to the new version. I follow over 300 feeds and have them organized in 15 categories such as news, favorite blogs, Finnish blogs.. I usually just click each folder and RSS Bandit loads all unread posts from all of the feeds in that category and I can mark them all read when I’m done. The up and down arrows can be used to move from one folder or feed to another.
Depending on the number of undread items I can also click on each feed separately or the unread items folder which loads posts from all categories. The posts that I want to read more thoroughly I usually open in Firefox.
One thing I also like about RSS Bandit is the possibility to synchronize the state of your feeds between computers by uploading them to a FTP server from the tools menu or by keyboard shortcuts. This is handy because I only use one another computer occasionally at my mother’s and I can install the program there. I prefer this to using online feed readers.
I tried clicking on just the folder, and that would be fine with me as well but sometimes a folder of feeds has a few hundred feeds in it. When that happens it tries to load them all in the reading pane and takes 30 seconds to a minute. I wish there was some way I could limit the number of items that shows up in the reading pane but I can’t. When I get up in the morning I have upwards of 5,000 posts to go through, and RSS Bandit takes too long to load them in the reading pane. I love the software…I just hope they will begin to gear it towards some of the people who always have a ton of articles to read.