The reviews for the most recent release of RSS Bandit have begun to flow in and they've been very positive. Below are excerpts from various blog posts and official reviews of the release.

Heinz Tschabitscher writes in the About.Com review of v1.3.0.38 of RSS Bandit

Guide Rating -

The Bottom Line

RSS Bandit is a nice and very capable feed reader that lets you browse news in an organized fashion. Its flexibility, virtual folders and synchronization abilities are great, but it would be even greater if it integrated with Bloglines in addition to NewsGator Online.

In his post Trying out, and loving, the new RSS Bandit Kevin Briody writes

Dare Obasanjo and team released the latest version of RSS Bandit (aka “Nightcrawler”), and I’ve got to say I’m really digging it. It is easily as fully featured as FeedDemon - my current reader - synchs with Newsgator, and has a few extra bells and whistles to boot. See comments to posts in a tree-menu drop-down is handy, and being able to customize the fonts and colors for browsing feeds is a lifesaver on the eyes.

All told, very cool. I’ll run Bandit and FD side-by-side for a while, but I may have myself a new reader.

In his post RSS Bandit rocks! Steve Lacey writes

Dare Obasanjo has just released the new version of his aggregator, RSS Bandit, and to put it bluntly, it completely rocks.

For the past eight months, I’ve been using my own home grown aggregator Katana. I wrote Katana as an experiment in C#/.Net programming and because nothing else out there did everything I wanted an aggregator to do.

Now, RSS Bandit has come forward in leaps and bounds. My favourite features?

• The "River of News"/Newspaper view when clicking on a feed rather than the an article.
• Great feed discovery.
• Tabbed browsing.
• Performance. This release is way faster than previous releases.
• Support for folders. This is a key one that many other aggregators miss.
• Newsgroup integration.
• Style. Somewhere along the line, RSS Bandit got sexy…

If there’s one thing it’s missing, it’s the ability for comments to appear in the article window, inline with the article itself. I really like this feature in Katana. I’d also like some form of visual notification (article/feed in italics for example), that there are new comments available.

Other than that, I think I’m hooked. The “River Of News” view has accelerated my blog consumption.

In the post entitled RSS Bandit 1.3.0.38 on the Microsoft Show's blog it states

Dare Obasanjo released RSS Bandit 1.3.038. At first I was hesitant to download it wow, am I glad I did.

This time around RSS Bandit handled my large amount of feeds much better than prior releases (the last one I played with was .31). Huge performance boost – and my machine is not a low spec’d machine. Prior releases it would take forever to go through them all which in comparison FeedDemon blazed through it. Not this time though…RSS Bandit did great!

One feature I never really appreciated before: RSS Bandit has a folder to show feed errors. In comparison FeedDemon lists you know on the feed that there is an error but having a list is handy especially since I have monitor a lot of feeds for various purposes.

Speaking of errors, RSS Bandit used to give me errors when the feed was working. I am not getting the same amount or “wrong” errors. Yes, the occasional unable to connect which is standard with all readers. RSS Bandit is much more accurate now. I think that is why I appreciate the feature now. Since the feeds in the folder are “really” unavailable, I can better manage problem feeds.

I also love the threaded view – it really helps me keep track of the conversation, which I’ve admitted I have a problem with.

Playing with it a short time, I’m impressed with the improvements. Excellent work Dare!

In his post New RSS Bandit released Robert Scoble writes

Dare Obasanjo announces that a sizeable new release of RSS Bandit is now available. I downloaded and installed this and it looks great. This is a free RSS News Aggregator and is my favorite of the free ones out there. His post explains what’s new, but I really like that it synchronizes to NewsGator now.

I'd like to thank everyone for all the positive feedback. We definitely have more goodness planned over the next few months and will add some of the features requested above. There should be a bug fix release within the next 30 days to take care of any fatal edge case bugs which weren't found until after the release and will add a few more translations to the mix (e.g. Japanese & Russian). After that, our focus will be on the Jubilee release.