I just noticed that the most recent version of RSS Bandit has had over 20,000 downloads in just over a month. It seems like every day I find a new blog post from someone who's switched to RSS Bandit or just started using it as their first aggregator describing their improved user experience compared to other aggregators. Thanks for the support, there is even better stuff on the way.

I've been busy with work so in the meantime Torsten and Phil have been working on bug fixes for some of our most pressing user requests. In between releases we try to produce stable builds which early adopters can test to see if certain persistent bugs have been fixed. These RSS Bandit daily builds do not have an installer but can be downloaded and run directly by double-clicking on the RssBandit.exe icon after unzipping the folder. For example, the 6/15/2004 build fixes an issue with downloading feeds from behind a firewall. It should be noted that these interim builds are not expected to be release quality and have not been tested as rigorously as a full release that ships with an installer. However if you are interested in keeping pace with RSS Bandit development and providing feedback in making it an even better aggregator then keeping up with our daily builds is one way to do that. 

My workload at my day job has eased, so in the next few weeks I have time to work with Torsten on fixing a number of our reported bugs as well as prioritizing and implementing various feature requests. One thing I have noticed is that a number of people would like to get insight into our plans for the next release. The first cut at this was my prioritized Top 10 list of features for the next version of RSS Bandit. However that list doesn't take into account a number of smaller feature items we'd like to do nor does it give much detail about what we will do. Both Torsten and Phil would like to see proper specifications for the next release (requirements document, design docs, etc) which I'd gladly write since writing specs is something I was doing for fun before it became my day job. However this is work that would take away from coding time and since there'd only be one or two other readers of the document(s) I'm unsure as to whether just adding more detail to our existing communication practices isn't a better bet for the long run.

Whatever is decided, we will be blogging about features as they are being implemented and providing builds which showcase the new features so we can get feedback from users.  The only question is how detailed we will be about discussing features before they actually show up as downloadable bits.