Interesting changes for FeedDemon, more to come?

Posted on November 2nd, 2009

Steven Hodson did a interview recently with the creator of FeedDemon Nick Bradbury. In that interview, a few things of interest were revealed for the first time. Mainly, that Nick is no longer with NewsGator:

What we haven’t mentioned before (yes, you’re reading it here first) is that I’m no longer employed by NewsGator.  FeedDemon remains a NewsGator-branded product, but I’m 100% in charge of it now, and I’m once again an indie developer.  FeedDemon is my sole focus – and my sole source of income. Given that so many people find the idea of paying for software to be alien, having ads ensures that I can earn a living.

Those who have followed me for a while know I used to be a heavy FeedDemon user for a long time. However, because I use multiple PCs and need quick access to the same feeds and their read/unread states – I was forced to ditch FeedDemon as it just wasn’t cutting it. I kept getting into a state where some feeds were not updating weeks at a time and never knew it. I couldn’t tell what feeds I was missing out on. I ended up using Google Reader as many of my fellow geeks recommended that as the best route to take for an online RSS reader I can access anywhere.

Based off Steven’s interview today, I learned a few things about FeedDemon that I didn’t know since FeedDemon sort of fell off my radar. First off – FeedDemon is now ad-supported. Last time I used FeedDemon, it simply was free without ads. What do I think about this? Not sure yet. I’m currently giving FeedDemon 3.0 (the latest version out) a try. If I don’t like the ads, I can purchase a ad-free copy of FeedDemon for $14.95. Depending on the level of intrusion the ads have within the app, I may end up just paying the ad-free version. We’ll see. Secondly, FeedDemon no longer syncs with NewsGator Online since NewsGator killed the service. I knew they killed the service but did not know of the heavy effort on Nick’s part to integrate Google Reader sync into the heart of FeedDemon. My biggest concern about using FeedDemon is that its hard to tell what’ is updating and what hasn’t updated. When I was using it before, I had so many issues with “sync” and seeing the same feeds updated with the same content over and over again it just wasn’t worth it. Will it behave the same way with Google Reader sync?

After a few days with FeedDemon, I’ll post back how I feel about using the app again.

Read Steven’s above mentioned interview! Nick does hint out some interesting changes coming to FeedDemon. Could FeedDemon become more like a TweetDeck-like app? One thing I will say right off the bat – Nick, please give FeedDemon a much needed UI overhaul!