FeedReader3 - probably the best feed reader out there

What is Feedreader ?

“Feedreader is a FREE RSS news aggregation solution that provides robust, state-of-the-art features in an intuitive, user-friendly environment.”

I think that pretty much covers it all. A good application, just like any other product or service will speak for itself. Basically this neat app has everything a feed reader should have. For the beginning you should know that this is not a web-based feed reader like Google Reader or many others. No, this is a 100% desktop application that collects your feed data and serves it to your delight.

What is so cool about it ?

The structured way of interaction, the user-friendliness, the easy-to-follow, non-intrusive grouping of news makes everything so easy with FeedReader3. I honestly think that such a professional yet easy to use interface has to do something with a little of psychology. You can’t design everything so well and put it in the RIGHT place without having a little bit of experience in how a person approaches these kind of apps. For example the three main panes starting with the tree-like structure of the feed directory, followed by the content of the selected feed and ending with the built-in browser make everything incredible easy and less stressful. The content of the selected feed however has some almost unique and powerful features when it comes to organizing a certain feed. It groups all the news in a category-like structure based on the date when the post was submitted. For example a particular feed content is grouped in the following manner: today, yesterday, this week, last week, last month and older. This is just an example of simplicity and easiness of access. Also the attachment icon will be present if the post contains any kind of attachments such as archives, different files or any other media files. The exact date and hour when the post was published will also be present in the right of the corresponding post. Of course this is just the standard look. I enjoyed it so much that i didn’t feel the need of adding something else. However you can easily filter your content by a whole bunch of things such as date, read or unread posts, tag, source, date, creator, etc. If you feel like you need to try another layout you can choose to change it to classic, wide and full. If you have problems with the size of the text you can selecte a larger or a smaller font size for all of your feed’s content.

What more features does it have ?

When it comes to updating your feed collection, FeedReader3 does it by itself. Practically it checks for new updates in all of your feeds and alerts you in a decent way regarding the new content. That way you can concentrate more on your productivity instead of browsing all the feeds you are subscribed to, just to check if there is something new. Smartfeeds are a must-have and FeedReader3 has them. You just need to type in some keywords that are relevant to you and FeedReader3 will help you aggregate news related to that particular selection of yours. It’s as simple as it can get. Also FeedReader3 can automatically download enclosures and podcasts attached to any article in your feed. Not only that it downloads the attached files, it also provides a native interface to help you tag and categorize them. The default enclosures “directories” are all, audio, video, images and other. Of course, full support for Unicode and SSL connections is available. You don’t need to worry if you have a large amount of feeds. The stress can now go away because this cool app will organize your new content and feed it to you just like a pro. As far as portability, I was very pleased when I exported my feed list out of Wizz RSS to an OPML file and imported it in FeedReader without any problems. You can have FeedReader send you e-mail to keep you informed regarding new feed content. Nevertheless another cool feature is the rating system that allows the app to suggest you possibly interesting articles based on the statistic he gathered when you starred different articles.

Will these great features affect my desktop performance ?

For example it’s installer is under 4MB. FeedReader3 knows how to manage itself with the exact amount of available resources he needs and nothing else more. So don’t need to worry about the fact that this is a third-party app and it will take you longer to have access to your precious feed. You can easily choose to block any alerts whatsoever if you don’t want to be disturbed or eliminate all other features to have a low-cost reader in terms of resources. I tested it and these cool features won’t affect your computer’s performance at all !

Why is FeedReader better at reading feeds than ThunderBird ?

I can’t stand third-party apps that want to do everything by themselves. This is the solid reason why i dropped ThunderBird and used Wizz RSS News Reader. I just don’t like ACDSee-like apps that started to do a thing (in this case viewing pictures - and they did it pretty weel) but furthermore in hope that they will increase their sales by targeting a larger market segment (photos, audio, video, etc) ended up with a program that tries to do everything but actually nothing as it loads slower and lacks power features and must-haves. I’m not saying ThunderBird is like that because that wouldn’t be true (mainly because it is free and it is developed my Mozilla), but i like to regard it as an email client and not as a suite of emails, rss reader and god knows what else. Programs are just like humans. They can’t be professionals at everything. As soon as they try to do many things at once their level of performance is very likely to go down. So i think they should concentrate more on one thing rather than a bunch. As far as this matter goes, I will try to cover it alone in a future post.

What are the demands of FeedReader ?

Almost zero. With this reader you don’t have to worry about incompatibility issues as it supports the most common feed formats out there. Regarding the OS, it runs without any problems on Windows 2000 and all the above versions.