Feed Demon 2.5.0.1 Beta

Title:

Feed Demon 2.5.0.1 Beta

File Size:

3.4 MB

Requirements:

Windows (All Versions)

Language:

en-us

License:

Freeware

Date Added:

21 Mar 2007

Publisher:

NewsGator Technologies

Homepage:

http://www.newsgator.com

MD5 Checksum:

D711374A879F225FEDE56FD5EBB84732

Top 5 new features
- Synchronized news bins with shared RSS feeds
- Prefetch unread items for offline reading (File|Prefetch Unread Items)
- Dinosaur report
- Who's linking here?" icon added to each post in a newspaper
- Embedded videos now display in newspapers

Other Additions
- Added: Ability to choose which feeds to show in the desktop alert (Options|Desktop Alert|Choose Feeds) (hat tip to Nick Harris)
- Added: Watches can now be included in the desktop alert (Options|Desktop Alert)
- Added: Synchronization of flagged items
- Added: Emailing posts as HTML is now supported when Microsoft Outlook is installed and is the default email client.
- Added: "Ignore new items older than" added to feed properties (useful for feeds that keep republishing old items). Related to this, new keyword search feeds default to ignoring items older than 7 days.
- Added: Date filter added to subscription search
- Added: "Mark page read" added to top right of "Surfer" newspaper style
- Added: "Mark page read and goto next page" added to toolbar above browser
- Added: Mousing over an item in the news item list now shows its URL in the status bar
- Added: "Show Toolbars" added to View menu (provides keyboard-centric users a way to hide all the toolbars)
- Added: Enclosure URL (if any) is now included when emailing a post
- Added: Significant performance boost when building "Popular Topics"
- Added: Significant performance boost when navigating subscriptions with keyboard shortcuts or toolbuttons
- Added: We had two reports of corrupted FeedDemon watches and news bins following a system crash. As a result, this version includes the ability to silently recover corrupt data files, as well as better detection of system failures during file writing to avoid corruption in the first place.
- Added: Feed properties icon added to top right of Surfer newspaper
- Added: When working offline, clicking a link to a page that's not available offline results in a system beep along with a message in the status bar informing that the page isn't available.
- Added: When viewing a newspaper while working offline, links that aren't available offline are displayed in a different style
- Added: The dialog that asks whether to connect when working offline now includes a "Don't ask me again this session" checkbox.
- Added: Activation/startup wizard now includes a "Search Feed" page which automatically subscribes you to keyword search feeds
- Added: "What is RSS?" page added to tutorial
- Added: Opening a new tab shows a page containing tips for using tabbed browsing
- Added: Slightly improved performance when running over a Remote Desktop Connection
- Added: "History of auto-discovered feeds" added to View menu, which displays a report of feeds auto-discovered over the past 14 days that you're not already subscribed to. Note that this will be empty upon first use (it populates over time)

Changes
- Changed: The address and search bars have been combined.
- Changed: Changes to read states when working offline are now synched immediately after returning from offline.
- Changed: "Browser Position" moved back to View menu
- Changed: "System Tray" page in options renamed to "Desktop Alert"
- Changed: Feeds whose attention data collection has been disabled are now excluded from popular topics
- Changed: In previous versions, attempting to browse an external URL while working offline would always result in being asked whether to connect. This has been changed so that FeedDemon first checks whether a copy of the URL exists in IE's cache, and if so it will display it rather than attempt to connect.
- Changed: Folders that are child folders online now display their full path in the subscription tree
- Changed: Feeds with the least attention now excludes feeds that were added within the past two days
- Changed: If a feed with unread items is selected and an external web page is showing, clicking "Mark page read and goto next page" will redisplay that feed's newspaper instead of moving to the next feed.
- Changed: When FeedDemon fails to connect to the Internet, you're now asked whether to test the connection or work offline
- Changed: Confirmation dialog which asks whether to make FeedDemon the default feed reader can be disabled from the dialog itself
- Changed: FeedDemon now uses its own user agent instead of IE's when requesting images for display in a FeedDemon newspaper.
- Changed: In previous versions, hitting Ctrl+Space would navigate the news item list even when it was hidden. This has been changed so that it navigates the newspaper instead.
- Changed: "Suppress dialogs and error messages displayed by browser" now defaults to False. This was True in previous versions to prevent script error dialogs from appearing, but this had the side effect of also preventing login dialogs. FeedDemon now always prevents script errors from appearing, regardless of this setting.

Fixes
- Fixed: Read states not synched before applying changes to synchronized folders (80345)
- Fixed: Redirected enclosures not synched with iTunes (80347)
- Fixed: HTML not always stripped from titles in popular topics
- Fixed: Import dialog should disable the option to import from the common feed list when RSS platform isn't installed (81810)
- Fixed: When a watch or news bin is selected, "Next unread feed shouldn't skip watches and news bins (77960)
- Fixed: Progress bar showing status of previous tab when switching browser tabs
- Fixed: Unicode quotes and dashes aren't converted before passing a news item to an external blog publishing tool
- Fixed: "Reverse sort" toolbutton isn't re-enabled after changing newspaper filter from one that results in zero news items
- Fixed: "Show in external browser" should not be enabled for newspapers
- Fixed: Titles for newspapers containing a single news item fail to strip HTML
- Fixed: Items with the same date are sorted differently in the news item list than they are in the newspaper.
- Fixed: When viewing Popular Topics, clicking "Hide this topic" doesn't always work
- Fixed: "Interface not supported" exception when viewing XPS document in FeedDemon
- Fixed: Feeds added online aren't updated in FeedDemon until the next update cycle after they've been added
- Fixed: When FeedStation has been uninstalled, feeds that are configured to auto-download enclosures generate an error message during updating
- Fixed: FeedStation fails to correctly rename podcasts with multiple redirects (seen with this Scientific American feed) (81270)
- Fixed: Can't sync a feed that uses cookie-based authentication if the cookie exists when you attempt to subscribe to the feed
- Fixed: Incorrect display of ' in Atom feeds with text summaries (86299)
- Fixed: Search terms and URLs entered into the address bar are automatically submitted when the focus changes, even if the Enter key hasn't been hit.
- Fixed: FeedDemon doesn't reset the newspaper and splitter colors after the Windows theme changes
- Fixed: "Popular Topics" doesn't correctly match URLs with spaces in their query strings
- Fixed: "Internet Options" doesn't work under Windows Vista
- Fixed: Favorites menu doesn't work under Windows Vista
- Fixed: On Windows Vista, hitting ALT sometimes hides all buttons on a dialog
- Fixed: Login dialog for authenticated feeds appears when screen saver is active

Known Issues
Note that all of these will be resolved before the final release.
- "Who's linking here" sometimes returns no external results, even when they do exist
- Some URLs can't be added to synched news bins
- Turning off the RSS feed for one synched news bin may turn off all synched news bin feeds

Notes for newspaper developers
- Information about a post's comments is now stored in a node which has htmlUrl, xmlUrl and NumComments attributes
- The hard-coded hack in the previous version which determined a newspaper style's capabilities by checking its name has been removed. Third-party newspaper authors will need to add a 'fd:capabilites' node to their style which describes its capabilites, ex: 'Surfer' style uses (77329)