At first glance, the latest version of RSS Bandit looks just like pretty much every other desktop RSS reader for Windows. In other words, it looks like Outlook. But this week saw the released of RSS Bandit 1.7 Alpha with one killer new feature: support for synchronization with your Google Reader or NewsGator feeds.
Here's how it works. You download and install the open source application, and then click the File menu and select Synchronize Feeds. Pick your service and enter your login information and RSS Bandit will import your feed list in a matter of seconds. Any actions you take using the desktop reader should then be reflected at your online feed reader. You can mark items as reader, unread, or shared. And you can subscribe to feeds or remove feeds using RSS Bandit and the changes should apply to your online account.
At least that's the theory. In practice, we're still waiting for our changes to show up in Google Reader. We read a few items, unsubscribed from a feed, and over an hour later Google Reader is showing no sign that it's noticed. This is still Alpha software, so it's possible speedier updates could come at a later date.
RSS Bandit 1.7 Alpha also adds a new podcast download manager.
NewsGator, the company behind award-winning RSS readers FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and NewsGator Go!, has just released an update to its widget platform, in the form of Editor's Desk 2.1.
Editor's Desk is a web-based tool for creating widgets that can display dynamic content (using RSS) that can then be embedded into your website, Facebook page (as an app), Blogger, TypePad, NetVibes, iGoogle,Pageflakes, Live.com and Live Spaces.
Version 2.1 boasts an improved interface that is not only better looking, but easier to use. Version 2.1 has also added two new widget templates, a search tool (for premium subscribers), the ability to clone widgets and a way to monitor the feeds within your widgets for problems.
We played around with the new version of Editor's Desk and were impressed with how easy the whole creation process really was. To create a widget, you can either add your own RSS feeds or choose a collection of feeds from categories provided by NewsGator. The free version of the service only provides minimal customization options for your widgets, you can select from a set a templates and then modify some of the colors, but if you pay for the premium version of the service, you can customize the CSS and HTML of the widgets. Some companies like USA Today and The Discovery Channel have already done that with spectacular results.
How many of you subscribe to an RSS feed because you liked one post you read? Raise your hands please. No, seriously, raise your hands please. Now how many of you stay subscribed to that feed because you're either too lazy to unsubscribe, don't know how to unsubscribe, or don't want to hurt the bloggers' feelings by unsubscribing? Us too.
Using some Harry Potter magic sauce from a company called SenseArray, NewsGator will start showing you suggestions based on things that other people think are interesting. Hooray!
What's the catch? Well, to make this technology smarter, you'll have to interact with your feeds a little. That's OK. We know that the earth isn't run by Terminators machines...yet. Right now, SenseArray's technology uses forward and share numbers, as well as tags and comment data to calculate what might interest you. You'll be able to thumbs up and thumbs down stories to customize the experience though, so no worries. Rage against the machine, y'all!
Soon, NewsGator hopes to accurately predict your tastes, even before you know what your tastes are.
It looks like the company is also hoping to help us deal with our severe information overload (the 3% of us junkies) by letting us unsubscribe to those dormant feeds that we don't like anymore and keep us up to date with the Right Stuff. The stuff we'll actually, you know...read?
Oh, and no worries, it's not just for the geeks. Their new recommendation service will cover Top News, Entertainment, Sports, Fun Stuff, Science and Technology. While we're not sure what "Fun Stuff" actually is, we'll wait for T2 to suggest something.
Oh and please feel free to subscribe to the Downloadsquad feed. We're humans.
NewsGator has released an updated version of FeedDemon, the company's desktop RSS reader for Windows. FeedDemon 2.7 features a ton of bug fixes, a handful of new features, and best of all, it's still free. NewsGator used to charge for its desktop reader, but starting with FeedDemon 2.6 and NetNewsWire 3.1 for Mac the company started offering desktop clients for free.
Here are just a few of the changes in FeedDemon 2.7:
Quicker navigation of the subscription tree
Subscribe to multiple feeds at once from the "find feeds" menu
Copy a multi-line URL into the address bar and it will be shortened to one line
Support for multiple enclosures in a single post
Note that the FeedDemon home page still says the latest version is 2.6. But if you click the download link you should get FeedDemon 2.7.
NewsGator and AideRSS have partnered to add PostRank features to NewsGator's online RSS feed reader. PostRank is basically determined by looking at each item in a feed and determining its popularity based on factors such as how many comments it has received, how many other sites link to that post, how many times it has been saved to del.icio.us, or voted up on Digg. Each article is then assigned a rank between 1 and 10.
NewsGator users can now choose to sort their feeds according to PostRank, which will display the most popular items first, followed by less popular items. Of course, the system doesn't work very well if you're primarily interested in breaking news, as it takes time for an article to become popular. But if you just want to read the top news and skip the rest, PostRank can save you a lot of time.
AideRSS maintains its own website where you can enter any RSS feed to get its PostRank scores. Or you can install a Firefox plugin that will add PostRank to Google Reader. But thanks to the NewsGator integration, you won't need to visit a separate web site, download a plugin, or even know who AideRSS is to take advantage of their PostRank system.
How many of the applications you use on a daily basis are web-based as opposed to locally installed native applications? For me, the answer is way more than I ever would have expected.
Had you asked me this question a few years ago, I would have vehemently denied that the future of development is on the web. As much as I could see and understand the value of a ubiquitously available web-based application, there's just no way to approach the level of power and integration (not to mention the ability to be always-available) that is possible with well conceived and developed desktop software.
Of course, back then I didn't imagine that web applications could become as useful as Google Calendar or Remember the Milk. I also didn't imagine that light - yet still useful - versions of these apps would be available from my mobile phone almost wherever I was.
Most of these are probably pretty familiar names, but one is a newcomer in the web space: Evernote. Still in beta, the new version of Evernote contains a full-featured web version, but synchronizes seamlessly with desktop software on either Windows or Mac platforms. And it's a breath of fresh air.
NewsGator, the Denver based company behind ever-popular RSS readers such as NetNewsWire for Mac and FeedDemon for Windows, announced updates for these award-winning products. The full list of the updated products include FeedDemon 2.6 (for Windows), NetNewsWire 3.1 (for the Mac), NewsGator Go! (for mobile platforms), and Inbox (a Microsoft Outlook plug-in). According to NewsGator, users will see improvements in peformance, usability, and relavance improvements.
The second part of NewsGator's announcment is the most exciting - all these products are available for free! Yes, you read that correctly - start downloading away.
NewsGator products' built-in selling point their ability to sync with Newsgator's internet based servers. That is, if you use NetNewsWire at home and FeedDemon at work, you won't have duplicate items to read between the two applications.
Why did NewsGator set these products free? They are obviously shifting gears add corporate resources to monetize their Enterprise offerings such as the NewsGator Enterprise Server. NewsGator wants to take the success they've enjoyed in the consumer market and apply it to the Enterprise environment.
While China has a history of blocking computer users' access to many sites on the world wide interwebs, many clever Chinese citizens have figured out that RSS feeds provided a way around the Chinese firewall. Until now.
Ars Technica reports that China has started blocking any URL that starts with "feeds," "rss," and "blog." That makes it pretty difficult to access the feeds for an awful lot of websites, including pretty much any site syndicated by FeedBurner.
It looks like some Chinese users are having success with online feed-readers like Newsgator. We'll see how long it takes before China bans Newsgator. In the meantime, there's always proxies and anonymous web browsers like Tor.
Feed Each Other is a new social RSS reader. What does that mean? Well, it's kind of a social network and RSS reader all rolled into one, sort of like a cross between Google Reader and Facebook.
As an RSS reader, the layout should be pretty familiar to anyone who uses Bloglines, NewsGator, Google Reader, or any of the other popular web-based RSS readers. You can organize your feeds into folders and you can choose to view just headlines or full articles. Feed Each Other also has a pretty good site discovery feature. Type "Download Squad" into the search box, and our feed will come up right away.
But the social aspects are what really make Feed Each Other shine. When you view our feed, you'll see a list of popular feeds show up in the bottom left corner. These are feeds that users who like Download Squad have subscribed to. You can also view profiles of individual users who have subscribed to Download Squad on the upper right hand side just above our feed's content. You can click on a user profile and see what they're reading. If you like their taste in news, you can add them as a contact.
You can also share interesting articles from your feeds with other users. While Google Reader publishes your shared clips as a sort of standalone link blog, Feed Each Other lets your contacts see your shared items when they login. You can also leave comments on your shared items or others to see and respond to.
Feed Each Other has just emerged from an invitation-only beta, so while it's pretty robust, there are still a few kinks to work out. But the service definitely shows promise.
NewsGator, makers of the popular online and offline RSS reader, have announced a new application they built for Facebook that allows users to read and share news in the monster of a social network.
The NewsFriends Facebook application is a social news application that allows users to select friends and automatically check out the news they are reading. If you don't know what news is hot amongst friends, NewsFriends has a list of popular topics picked by NewsGator editors for popular sources of feeds in entertainment, sports, and top news. Current stories are displayed on profile pages, and news can be read, shared and commented on right in your profile from a single page. If there are video or audio feeds, they will play inside the NewsFriends application.
Will anything be left on the web? Are we slowly destroying the internet by building everything into the monster that Facebook is becoming?
Apple's decision to keep 3rd party apps locked out of the iPhone (for now) is still disappointing both users and developers alike, but that doesn't mean we can't get some actual functionality out of some truly unique web apps. For this week's brief Mobile Minute, I'm going to highlight some web apps, utilities and bookmarklets designed specifically for the iPhone that are rising above the rest.
1. 17 iPhone Bookmarklets
Chanpory Rith at LifeClever has published a list of 17 powerful bookmarklets for your iPhone, containing some truly useful stuff beyond the typical web app launchers that are quickly becoming a dime a dozen. At the top of my list are 'marklets like movie times and Wikipedia, which offer one-click popup access to search for local movie times or articles on Wikipedia (respectively). Other really useful ones are 'Find in this page' which is pretty straightforward, as well as 'Open links in new window,' which will reload the current page you're viewing on your iPhone and edit all the links on the page to, well, open in a new window. This is particularly useful since the iPhone doesn't seem to cache pages well (or it possibly uses a caching system that most sites simply haven't accounted for yet), but MobileSafari (the new name many are using for the iPhone's Safari browser) does tabbed browsing like a champ. In fact, it even remembers opened tabs after you power down and restart the phone, making a bookmarklet like this very handy to those like to truly explore the 6 degrees of the world wide web on their iPhone.
To get set up with these bookmarks, visit the LifeClever site in either Safari or Internet Explorer and add them to a folder of bookmarks you're synching with the iPhone. Perform a sync and you're ready to go.
As RSS becomes more and more of a vital tool for online media consumption and production with each passing day, the need for efficient and well-integrated RSS clients rings loud and true. NetNewsWire for Mac OS X is just such a client. Originally borne of (and still written and managed by) indie Mac dev Brent Simmons, it was purchased after v2.x in 2005 by NewsGator to help round out their empire of powerful RSS clients that now span Mac, Windows and even mobile devices.
More or less since its inception, however, NetNewsWire has been hailed as one of the best Mac apps of all time, and for a while (and possibly still) held the title of most widely used RSS reader on any platform, including Windows. NetNewsWire has earned these accolades by offering a powerful set of features in a well-designed UI, and integrating very well with other Mac OS X tools. It offers support for anywhere from ten to hundreds - if not thousands - of feeds, various methods for synching read/unread news item states between computers, a built-in tabbed browser based on WebKit (the same rendering engine Safari and many other Mac OS X browsers use), blogging to any number of desktop clients such as ecto and MarsEdit (another app originally developed by Simmons), synching open tabs between computers and posting them all as a linkdump to said blog editors, bookmarking in del.icio.us, AppleScript and much more. Today's version 3.0 milestone, however, takes NetNewsWire to an entirely new level.
New in this release is even more desktop integration, offering things like Spotlight searching of news items, adding blog authors to Address Book, support for microformats, Growl notifications of news item downloads, sending news items to Twitterrific (the Iconfactory's stellar Twitter client for Mac OS X) and more. Clippings can also be synchronized between computers and the web, and a plethora of UI and performance enhancements make NetNewsWire sing even better on both PowerPC and new Intel Macs.
Of course, you can take all this power for a test drive by downloading a demo from NewsGator, but if you fall for NetNewsWire like so many other RSS users, a license costs a mere $29.95.
[Update: Scott McNulty at our sister site, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, just published 5 questions with Brent Simmons, an interview with NetNewsWire's developer on his thoughts of the new release, why he prefers the desktop software to the AJAX hype and the choices he had to make when adding - or choosing not to add - new features.]
These days it seems like the whole world has shifted over to web-based RSS aggregators like Google Reader and Bloglines. If you're a holdout and prefer to use a Windows desktop application reader, you might be pleased to note that NewsGator's FeedDemon has recently had an update to version 2.5. FeedDemon is widely accepted as the best Windows-based offline reader, and the only reason that it doesn't kill the competition is that it is a commercial product, whereas it is competing against a host of free alternatives.
Anyhow, there are a lot of people that use FeedDemon and those users can now take advantage of the new features that have been added to it, like better support for offline reading and a very well conceptualized Popular Topics report.
The new offline reading functionality gives users the ability to prefetch unread items, which will store not only all images in unread posts, but a configurable number of linked pages. While this process can take awhile, it gives you what is essentially a full-featured feed reading and browsing experience while offline. Good stuff.
The new Popular Topics page lets you see at a glance which topics are being linked to and commented upon often amongst the feeds that you are subscribed to, with a callout that shows what is most popular amongst all of NewsGator Online's users. Great stuff.
For similar functionality on a Mac, check out NetNewsWire, also owned by NewsGator.
FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are undoubtedly top-notch products, and ones that we have used regularly in the past. Unfortunately, they may be some of the best and last in a dying breed of software; with the recent addition of offline browsing functionality to Google Reader, there is one less reason not to simply consume your feeds in a browser. Working in a browser for feed reading adds the advantage of not needing to switch contexts from feed reader to browser, or work with an under-powered built-in browser in an offline reader. Since you're dealing with web content, what better place to do so than in a browser?
Intel has collaborated with six software companies to build a next generation collaboration software suite for the productivity of businesses.
SuiteTwo is the name, and the six well known companies participating are piping in their advanced applications to create one single powerful application. NewsGator is supplying RSS, SimpleFeed, Six Apart's Movable Type has the hold on the blogging platform, Socialtext adds in a searchable wiki, SpikeSource provides the hosting, and Visible Path has integrated new social networking capabilities.
Competition for this product can be seen from IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com. With their partners in this application, Intel will surely hit the lead spot for this enterprise level business application. The announcement of the release was made at the Web 2.0 conference this week, and the product is available for demo.
Blackberry and Java-enabled cellphone users can now use NewsGator Go!, the mobile version of NewsGator's RSS feed reading software. Up until now, the NewsGator Go! was only available for Windows Mobile devices.
While web-based NewsGator accounts are free, NewsGator Go! will set you back $30. But the program has a few nice features, including the ability to synchronize with your online account, the ability to email stories from your cellphone, and one-handed navigation.
While mobile web browsers are getting more and more powerful, few can handle web-based feed readers like NewsGator. And so while it would be nice to be able to surf to your free web-based account using a Blackberry, it might be worth paying for a version optimized for small screens and slower processors. Not sure it's worth paying $30 for, but definitely worth something.
How many of you subscribe to an RSS feed because you liked one post you read? Raise your hands please. No, seriously, raise your hands please. Now how many of you stay subscribed to that feed because you're either too lazy to unsubscribe, don't know how to unsubscribe, or don't want to hurt the bloggers' feelings by unsubscribing? Us too.
These days it seems like the whole world has shifted over to web-based RSS aggregators like Google Reader and Bloglines. If you're a holdout and prefer to use a Windows desktop application reader, you might be pleased to note that NewsGator's 
