Feedreader implemented my Bandit feature requests!


Today, I discovered another free RSS Reader called Feedreader, and I decided to turn away from RSSBandit. The main reason for trying another reader was that I did not get proper support for feeds that did not work in RSSBandit and I got the typical answer “Feed does not validate with feedvalidator”.

Using Feedreader (abreviated FR in the rest of this post) was an eye-opener for me. It was as if RSSBandit had implemented all my feature requests, thoroughly debugged them, and made the interface much smoother.

Here, I cite only the major things that work perfectly in FR and that I had asked in this forum for monthes, but remain to be seen in RSSBandit. All of this has been reported in RSSBandit forum, please make a search for more details

- FR works for all my feeds so far. RSSBandit should be more robust even for feeds that do not 100% follow RSS specifications. FR takes this very seriously and has a specific support forum for feeds that have problems.

- FR is good for the eyes. Press a “A+” button and the font in the article will increase. I killed my eyes reading articles in RSSBandit on a 15inch laptop screen, and did not want to spend time understanding style-sheet files.

- FR can hide read feeds and read items, making the subscription tree much easier to look at

- FR can filter feed items based on conditions (eg “contains xx keyword”). This is called “smart feed”

- FR uses an intelligent update mechanism to automatically fine-tune polling time for each feed. It is a big time waister in RSSBandit to manually fine-tune for each feed the update interval, and very easy to lose those settings by changing just 1 global parameter.


FR has many more features that I did not even think of before. Example: adding tags to feed items, grouping feed item duplicates, etc.


Well, you might wonder: “Right, but RSS Bandit must have better features than FR?” Well, the only point where RSSBandit surpasses FR for me is the ability to specify an alternate location of the database by adding a couple of lines to RSSBandit.exe.user.config. But that is about all…

When I started using RSSBandit at the end of 2006, I had the impression that it was ahead of the pack of free RSS readers. But I did not see any major new feature in RSSBandit, and it feels like the project has been on hold for the last 6 monthes.

I do not want to pick on you, developers, I know that you have had pretty busy personal lives lately, and this is the most important. Still, with the today announcement of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire going free AND RSSBandit soon releasing 2.0, it sounds as if you are pushed by increased competition, and it does not sound as if you are leading the pack anymore!

Well, I sincerely hope that you will at least catch-up when you release RSSBandit 2.0. I may try it when it comes out, but the only thing that can have me revert to RSSBandit in the future is the addition of new features that will make it stand out from the pack. You know, the wow factor. Anyway, I wish you good luck with RSSBandit further development!

RSS Bandit is better :)

Great news, i am looking forward to the 2.0 release but anyway after having used more RSS Readers in the past, RSS Bandit is the best one :)

You're welcome for the shout out, Dare :) If you'd like to offer a similar feature which imports from FeedDemon, just drop me a line and I'll share the details with you (although I'm guessing you've probably figured it out already).

looks like he did.. may be ms will add this to their framework