RSS Tool and Apple
August 21st, 2004 • Technology
By popular demand (actually Coty posting a comment on this), here is my pick of RSS aggregation tools. I downloaded and bought (for $29.95) FeedDemon. FeedDemon has a couple of things I really like and one I really don’t like but I’ve organized a work around for myself. FeedDemon doesn’t just download and maintain your feeds but it will proactively search the feeds for terms that you specify. Matching feed items are copied into these search channels so that you can quickly find information of interest which is especially useful when you have a lot of feeds. The thing I don’t like about FeedDemon is the lack of a structured feed index. So because of that, if you have one channel group selected as active, the non-active channel groups won’t get updated. The way to get around this is to stick all of the feeds in one master channel group. This makes your feeds non-organized but I’ll suffer that to have all the feeds updated constantly.
A good alternative choice (but it doesn’t have the same search capabilities) for those who don’t want to buy software is the freely available FeedReader. For me, the ability to have search channels was too much of a factor so I passed on FeedReader. I’m sure other folks will provide this functionality in their readers soon but I believe FeedDemon is the only one right now.
Finally, I don’t have a strong hate for Apple, just the method of their madness. I used to be a solid Apple guy until Apple decided to abandon the (in my opinion, more advanced at the time) Apple // line of computers in favor of the Macintosh line. A company that will do a wholesale dump of an entire product line (and the customer base using those products) like that is one that I can’t trust with my money. That being said, with a closed system like what Apple builds with controlled software and hardware, there is little chance of incompatibility and everything works really well together. You just end up paying for that compatibility insurance with higher hardware and software costs due to the controlled and closed nature of their systems.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention another great feature of FeedDemon. FeedDemon will use Windows’ built in browsing capability but it is possible (through a experimental patch) to have it use the FireFox/Mozilla rendering engine instead. If you use FireFox or Mozilla you’ll know how important this is. The Gecko engine is way faster than the engine used in IE.
