14 DAY TRIAL // Information is a real weapon nowadays as it smoothes your path to success. My teachers always said that if I had the necessary information, nothing could stand in my way. Of course, they were referring to information about their classes, so I wasn't very interested in that. Later on, when I became to grow and I started to choose my way in life, I understood that a well prepared person can achieve a lot.
And information is the way to do it. This is why I decided to review Feed Demon, a software that retrieves the news and information from the Internet. The software is developed by NewsGator Technologies Inc and the price for the full version is $29.95. The trial period you are offered is of 30 days, so there is plenty of time to evaluate the application and decide if it is worth the money or not.
Installing the software on your computer is no sweat and if you are new to feeding, then you will highly appreciate the wizard that helps you to configure the topics you want to receive the feeds from. The first step when using the software is to create a NewsGator online account. Once this is done (it will not take long at all), there is nothing between you and configuring the software to retrieve the desired news.
If you take the wizard way, you will be provided with a list of topics, each of them containing a list of websites or blogs that deal with that subject. Choose the topics you are interested in and that's it. The flexibility of the software allows the user to add as many sources as s/he wants belonging to whatever subject.
The interface of the software is nothing unusual and the user will not feel the lack of skins as all the attention is directed towards bringing the information in plain view. Do not be worried if there is no news displayed in the right side of the application window as you have to perform an update. Press F5 and you will see the information flow retrieved.
In the Subscriptions tree there will be displayed the folder topics and the number of feeds retrieved. The same is available when you look at the sources. The feeds presented can be viewed in several modes. Content options allow the user to configure the software to show full posts, summaries or headlines only. The grouping can be done following several criteria: by feed, by date or by title. To read the most recent feeds, I recommend using the grouping by date.
The internal browser permits the user to navigate directly to the desired title. I was impressed to see that the web browser is equipped with tabs. Some users may not appreciate this feature so the developer predicted this and included a feature that allows you to open the feed in the default external browser.
If by any chance a certain feed is not in the desired category, you can move it where it belongs by using the Move Feed option under Edit. In the Feed Properties window there are five tabs that can be configured according to your needs. The first one is General and here you can change the title, the feed URL as well as the home page URL.
Updating, the second tab allows you to enter the number of feeds to keep. The default setting is to keep the most recent 200 feeds. Statistics will show you the date and time of the last post, the total number of items, number of unread items, emailed ones, flagged, etc.
The Advanced Properties tab lets the user choose the style (default, Blue Vista, Expando, Outland, Photo Strip, Surfer and Prince). Notes allows you to enter some private comments about the respective feed.
The Good
The software is simply amazing, the updating is done in real time and, depending on your connection, is pretty fast. The flexibility allows the user lots of configurations and settings and you can add your own sources if you consider the provided ones not being trustworthy.
The Bad
The baddie is that the software is not free, but hey, for such a good job, the developer deserves setting the price.
The Truth
A must have software, despite the price (which, if you think of it, is not too high). Compared with what I have seen by now, Feed Demon is by far the best.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
