Latest News At Your Fingertips

excellent
key review info
application features
  • Finding Feeds
  • (6 more, see all...)

The new currency in the entire world has been established for a long time and it is information. Everybody pays for it, one way or another and it seems that retrieving it is not at all costing. With the new instruments on the market called News Readers, you don't even have to open the websites on the Internet in order to see the latest news. All you have to do is to pick up a feed reader, populate it with Internet locations to read the news from and wait. Each time a new article is published on one of the monitored locations you will receive a notification.

Feed Demon is among the best on the market when it comes to feed reading and the options a power user needs for drawing the maximum efficiency and flexibility from the software. Up until recently the user benefited from a 30 days trial period for testing the software, but this is no longer available because the application came to its senses and turned freeware.

The interface is as neat and easy to use as ever, displaying the subscriptions in the left part, the browser and the feeds in the left. Everything can be organized in such a manner that even the most disoriented user can easily find what s/he needs. Plus the search function available in the application (Ctrl+F3) will definitely come in handy when looking among your subscriptions for news with specific subject as you benefit from wide criteria in order to get the most accurate results.

Immediately after installation Feed Demon will not leave you dry on feeds and proposes you a default list of subscriptions covering interesting subjects from different areas of activity ranging from Science, Technology, News, Marketing, Health and Fitness or Entertainment to Blogs and Blogging, Web Authoring, Business and Games. All these are available at the first run of the software and are arranged in separate folders, according to the field they are connected to.

As you could see from the first run of the application, you have the possibility of creating a NewsGator account absolutely free of charge. This account is extremely important for those wishing the application was portable as it is an online storage of all the feeds on the local computer. More than this, the online account and the feeds on the computer can be synchronized so that you always have the same items in both places and you can access them from virtually any Intenet connected computer.

There is really no big deal about Feed Demon, but there are some things that make it rise above the regular RSS readers out there. First of all, you can configure the application to keep an eye on news related to an user defined subject and place them in a special folder called Watches. You get to specify a bunch of keywords and the application will automatically separate news containing that word (either in news description as well as in its title) making it easier for you to stay informed on that particular subject.

Clippings folder is yet another important feature in Feed Demon, and it functions just like the bookmarks folder in your web browser. You can keep the most important feeds there in order to have them within easy reach.

But one of the most important features sported by Feed Demon is its ability to search the Web for a particular subject provided by the user. This way you do not have to bust your chops looking for websites dealing with the subject you need, but simply type in a query in Feed Demon and wait a sec or two for the results to return. They come complete with title, description, feed and host link. This way you can investigate the relevance of the result yourself, especially when it is as easy as clicking Preview button. The drawback of this feature however is that you will have to add each source at a time.

You can be sure of maintaining all the feeds fresh and delete old news from the computer with a few mouse clicks by using the Cleanup Wizard. It allows sweeping every folder in Feed Demon of old items (you get to set the age limit for the feeds). The Panic Button automatically marks as read all feeds that exceed a user defined value. As sometimes you only need the title to realize that some news is not worth opening, many items remain unread. Feed Demon permits the user to automatically mark as read all the items older than an user specific time (from 1 to 5 days old or all of them).

The flexibility of the application allows for synchronization with the online account only of the folders you choose by simply going to Tools>Synchronization Options and checking all folders you want synced with the online account. You can also set the frequency for updating the feeds (from one minute to 999).

As for the internal web browser opening the feeds for you, it is modern, sports tabbed browsing plus access to the feeds you've been most attentive with (there is a special algorithm based on actions like feed visits, number of items read in the feed, etc., which have a certain weight in the classification; flagging, clipping and watching a feed will bring major contribution).

Feed Demon is one of the best RSS readers on the market providing a flexible set of options, portability, feed ranking or feed searching as well as a very nice looking web browser, all at the cost of a download. However, there are minor glitches in the application like the fact that setting synchronization options to Subscriptions folder will not affect all sub-folders it contains. Computer resource usage may be a problem for users with low RAM as the application can reach levels of even 80MB.

The Good

Feed Demon comes with lots of flexibility, allowing the search of the feeds either on the Internet or on the local computer, permitting synchronization with an online account that can be accessed from any computer.

You can start with the default set of feeds or add your own as time goes by. The internal web browser supports tabbed browsing and it is very easy to handle.

A cleanup tool will eliminate all items non-compliant to user defined age criteria.

Shared experience feature connects you to the most popular news of NewsGator users and allows you to find out who is slinking to the news you are reading.

The Bad

The computer resources usage is not quite one of Feed Demon's strengths as the app tends to take a pretty chunk of RAM. Synchronization with NewsGator of Subscriptions folder will not affect all the sub-folders available.

The Truth

Feed Demon was among the best RSS readers on the market even when you had to pay for it and now, that it is free, it is even better. Although it is not portable accessing your folders from different computers is no issue as long as you remember the username and password to your NewsGator account.

It can handle a myriad of feeds with the same rate of success as low numbers. Ease of use and flexibility are among the top features of the software.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 5
features 5
ease of use 5
pricing / value 5


final rating 5
Editor's review
excellent