The popular and venerable FeedDemon RSS reader, which has previously been available in both free and paid for versions, has finally come to the end the road. Developer Nick Bradbury initially announced The End of FeedDemon via an article published on his blog, citing the demise of Google Reader, time constraints, and diminishing returns as contributing factors. Fortunately, due to an overwhelming user response to the news, Nick has had a change of heart and produced one last Pro version which he has most generously made available for free (good one Nick!):
Since announcing the end of FeedDemon last week, I’ve been overwhelmed by the number of people who say they’re sad to see it go. Many of these people have told me they want to keep using it.
So here’s what I’m going to do: sometime before the demise of Google Reader, I’ll release a new version of FeedDemon which no longer syncs with Google Reader. This version will be free, won’t contain any ads, and will have all of the features of the Pro version. You can use it free of charge for as long as you like – but it will be the last version of FeedDemon. <source: My Plan for FeedDemon>
FeedDemon Key Features:
- Newspaper displays news items from dozens of sites in a single web page for easy reading
- Watches collect news items containing specific words or phrases, alerting you to items of interest so you don’t have to look for them
- News Bins store your favorite news items for future reference
- Podcasts let FeedDemon automatically download audio files and copy them to your iPod or other media device
- Tabbed browser for surfing the web within FeedDemon
- Support for Atom 0.3 and all versions of RSS
- Easy to use for beginners, yet powerful enough to please the most sophisticated news junkie
- Native Windows application, so it runs fast and does NOT require the bulky .NET runtime.
FeedDemon Pro Features (over and above Free version):
- My Stream: Quickly receive and view new articles in your most important feeds – great for frequently-updating status feeds such as those from Twitter and Facebook.
- FeedStation: Download multimedia files and have them automatically copied them to your iPod or other portable media player. You can even schedule your downloads so they happen overnight – when you wake up, you’ll find new content waiting for you.
- Prefetching: Prefetch the images and web pages linked in your unread items so they’re available when working offline (without an Internet connection).
- Content Filters: Instead of seeing every single article in every single feed, create a content filter which automatically hides articles that don’t interest you.
- Newspaper Styles: Customize FeedDemon by selecting from four different newspaper styles, and assign different styles to individual feeds, folders and watches.
- Secure Feeds: Subscribe to authenticated feeds, including Twitter OAuth feeds and Intranet (“behind the firewall”) feeds.
Download FeedDemon Pro 4.5 for free here: http://www.feeddemon.com/
Feed Demon Pro, how nice – thank you Jim. Where else, but a DCT, does one find such goodies.