This article was written on October 03, 2006 by CyberNet.
Tracking Down Great Software For You!
I have been using the GreatNews RSS Reader for exactly two months and it has been pretty good. I wasn’t looking to switch to a new feed reader until I stumbled upon the cleverly named Feedreader. It looked so clean and simple that I felt like I had to give it a try…and of course it is free!
My first impression was very good because I was shocked at how simple, yet powerful, the software was. The more I started to play with it the more I started to like it.
There are a lot of great features that really stand out to me. First, In the View menu there are two options that say “Hide read articles” and “Hide read feeds”. I particularly like the “Hide read feeds” because it will only show you the feeds that have new articles that you need to read. This reduces the clutter from the screen especially if you subscribe to hundreds of different feeds.
The next feature that is my absolute favorite is the Smartfeed option. It will basically search the articles in your feed list for keywords that you specify or one of the other many options that you can search for. For those of you familiar with WinAmp then it kinda reminds me of the Smart Playlists feature:
What would a feed reader be without a cool alert slider? Yep, Feedreader has one of the nicest that I have seen and it notifies you each time there is a new story:
There is a lot more that Feedreader can do so make sure you checkout the Options that they have available (particularly the Advanced tab).
It does have a few things that I’m not too fond of but they are all something that I can deal with. The first thing is that there is no button to mark all of the feeds as read. You have to either right-click on the feed/folder and select “Mark as Read” or you can press Ctrl+R, but ideally there should be a button to do this.
The second thing that I don’t like is that they apparently removed the option to set the default update frequency and now you have to change it on each feed individually. They do that because they believe their IntelliSense option is better so they set it by default. It is designed to recognize how often a feed is typically updated and it will adjust the schedule accordingly. So if a site doesn’t update their feed for a few days at a time then it may only check for updates each day. If you don’t want to use this option then you can change it for each feed with choices as low as 1-minute update intervals.
This is going to be my feed reader from now on and hopefully the developer continues to add more features…all while keeping the interface as simple as it currently is.
| Update: | The developer of Feedreader commented below saying that you can easily change the update frequency of multiple feeds simultaneously: “You can change update period of all feeds if you go to feed management and then do Control A or select some feeds while holding down control. Now only archive size and update period is active. Change those and press Save. Voila – you have changed update period for multiple feeds.“ |
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