Click to see full screenshot
The first public beta of Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon is out. Nick is the maker of the TopStyle CSS editor, known for its good usability. And just as TopStyle helped making CSS more popular to not-so-hardcore-techies, FeedDemon might achieve that for news aggregators.
FIRST QUICK LOOK
My first quick look left me with a very good impression, as obviously, usability stands in the focus of Nick's development. If you want to maintain overview over a very large amount of feeds, SharpReader might still be your choice, as FeedDemon does not seem to have list views of all new items in all feeds or in specific categories. But it has loads of fine details like newspaper views (for single views or groups, with selectable time range or flag status), tabbed browsing, Feedster integration, clear divsion of feeds into groups, and at least two outstanding features, Watches and News Bins, that can make reading blogs in the aggregator very pleasant.
FEATURES
Watches are user-defined automatic searches: New news items get scanned for user-define keywords and listed in the respective Watch if one or more keyword appears. So if you just want to see all new items that contain the word "Mozilla", you just have a look at your "Mozilla" Watch instead of having to browse through all items - very handy and time-effective. News Bin are collectors: if you want to keep an item for further reference or processing, you just drag and drop it into a News Bin. "Blog this", or "Project x" would be obvious uses for News Bins.
USER EXPERIENCE
So if I want to keep track of what's going on in the news aggregator world, I set up a list of feeds I want to monitor and a Watch to have those feeds automatically scanned for keywords like "RSS, Aggregator, Feed Reader". Then, I browse through that Watch in list view in the left pane or read it in Newspaper view in the right pane and drag and drop items that are relevant to me from either of the views into my "Aggregators" News Bin, where I can work with them later - and that's what I call a good user experience.
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