RSS Bandit

RSS Bandit is a feature-rich software application that provides you with a user-friendly environment for reading favorite feeds. It caters to all types of users, regardless of their skill level.

Feeds are organized by category, as follows: Blogs, Comics, Entertainment, News, Podcasts, and others, but you can also add a new category or update an existing one.

Adding a new subscription to the list is particularly easy, thanks to the simple wizard that guides you throughout the process. By inputting a website, the tool automatically identifies available feeds and lets you select one or more of them, as well as assign a category and subscription source.

Feed details can be read in a familiar environment, which resembles the one of a standard email client. You may select any subject and view extended information on the bottom part of the screen, flag items, mark them as read or unread, as well as copy links, titles or content to the Clipboard.

It is possible to customize the column layout, block items using Windows Live Writer, or send an item via email or publish it on Twitter. You can also use a search function and specify fields (title, description, topic, item link), unless you're an experienced user who would rate configure advanced search settings (set the read status, item age, item posted, search scope).

RSS Bandit offers support for a built-in web browser with multiple tabs, and lets you import, export or synchronize feeds, view feed subscriptions, use a download manager, view top stories, manage identities and add-ins, use remote storage, and others.

As you can see, RSS Bandit packs an impressive amount of features, designed for first-time and more experienced users alike. It has a fair response time to commands and uses a high amount of CPU and RAM. However, no error dialogs have been shown in our tests and the program did not hang or crash. Too bad that RSS Bandit has not been updated for a while.