FeedDemon and AmphetaDesk

I had been offering an RSS feed of my own site for months before I felt the need to consolidate my lengthy blogroll list into an aggregator. There's no doubt that checking for updated posts via one application is faster than clicking through to each site manually. But syndication is still going through its tantrum-sprinkled toddlerhood and this lack of maturity trickles down to the applications used to read syndicated feeds as well.

I currently use FeedDemon to aggregate my feeds; however, I did try AmphetaDesk before looking elsewhere. Though it's free, AmphetaDesk is also clunky and slow. It displayed a default of about 20 posts from each feed on the main channels page. I tried to scale back to just one or two, but there didn't seem to be a setting for the number of items displayed.

A fellow blogger recommended FeedDemon's "newspaper mode" as a solution to my overload of posts. I downloaded the trial version and I was immediately pleased with the speed of refreshes as well as the familiar three-paned reading mode. As I explored FeedDemon, I found more reasons to choose a paid aggregator over the many free tools available.

Within FeedDemon, I can mark single items or entire feeds as read. Unread items stay bold for easy location later. There is also an option to set the entire channel group as read, but that (wisely) offers a dummy prompt before acting. Links can be opened in FeedDemon's own tabbed browser pane or in an external browser. HTML and images in posts are rendered accurately and the entire application minimizes to the systray where an icon change alerts me to new posts.

FeedDemon actually has more features than I need or use, like the Cleanup Wizard (removing old read posts) and posting to your own blog from within the application. You can also group feeds by category, creating several channel groups in a pull-down list. This is helpful for dividing your list between business and recreational reading, or any topics you prefer.

One useful AmphetaDesk feature, which FeedDemon does not currently offer, is automatic synchronization between multiple copies of the application. If I read all of my feeds before work in the morning, I want my work copy of FeedDemon to show only what I've missed during my commute. This lack of synchronization is also an issue when I add feeds in one location and don't remember to add them in the other location. I end up mailing OPML files between home and work more times than I care to.

One other drawback, (which is probably only an issue for a small percentage of news junkies), is that FeedDemon spits out a prompt for each feed added after 250. I'm at 350 feeds right now, which means at least 100 times I've had to assure the program that yes, I really do want to add one more feed to the channel group. FeedDemon should not be slowing down power users.

FeedDemon is a good choice for speed and reliability, but for someone checking a large list of feeds from multiple locations, a Web-based aggregator may more convenient.

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