Last month, I tried out the first public beta of the forthcoming new version 1.6 of FeedDemon, the RSS aggregator for Windows.
In my first impressions post, I commented mostly on the glitches I noticed, which weren't a big surprise given that it was the first beta.
Since then, beta 2 has come and gone and now beta 3 is available, which I've installed and am now using (and, today, installed beta 3a released yesterday). And I do like it - I've not experienced a single fault/problem/bug/crash so far.
I've been interacting with it a lot, doing all the things I usually do with the current release version 1.5 - things like toggling news items, copying them to news bins, blogging items, etc - as well as changing styles and generally giving the tyres a good kicking.
So if all this in one day is any indicator, it's looking pretty good. Many fixes, improvements and new things since beta 1 as you'd expect
A big improvement for me - the newspaper display issue that beta 1 exhibited (where the newspaper would not display news items in the same date order as the news items list, no matter what you did) has been fixed. Great!
Also it seems that one issue I had in beta 1 with synchronizing FD and NewsGator Online has been fixed. That issue was that if I deleted a channel in FD, it would get recreated when FD sync'd with NGOL. That behaviour doesn't seem to happen now - I deleted three channels yesterday; on sync this morning, FD did not retrieve those from NGOL (I haven't yet checked my NGOL to see if those channels are still there: I'd expect them to be deleted from NGOL as well).
One other thing - I have Internet Explorer 7 beta 1 for Win XP installed, which FD uses as its browser. Works absolutely fine, no issues with that. The only thing I've noticed is if I click on a link in a news item in the newspaper that takes me to the blog or site concerned, the status bar has an IE message saying that the phishing filter couldn't be loaded. But IE7 is a beta (as well!) so maybe it's more to do with that than with FD b3a.
Anyway, I think beta 3a is terrific, so looking forward to the next iteration!
Great to know FD1.6 is working smoothly for you now, Neville. I also noticed that "phishing" message with IE7, but like you, I'm assuming for now that's an IE7 beta issue.
Posted by: Nick Bradbury | 27 August 2005 at 13:26
Thanks, Nick.
One other thing I was pleased with - the LinkDump stylesheet
you created some months back works seamlessly with b3a.
All in all, pretty good work!
Posted by: Nevon | 27 August 2005 at 15:03