Google Reader Authentication Change 15 Jun 2010, 10:38 pm

Earlier this year, the Google folks announced a change to how applications like FeedDemon should authenticate with Reader.  Later this week, the old authentication system will be dropped.

FeedDemon has used the new authentication method ever since version 3.1.0.20, which was released several months ago.  If you’re using an older version, you’ll want to update to the latest version right away – otherwise, synchronization may no longer work for you.

PS: Sorry for the prolonged silence here – my family is in the middle of a move which turned out to be far more complicated than we planned!

I Just Bought a New Computer 9 Mar 2010, 8:38 pm

Localized FeedDemon 3.1 5 Feb 2010, 5:27 am

If you upgraded to the new FeedDemon 3.1 and English isn't your primary language, then you'll be pleased to hear that Chinese, Czech, French, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish language files are now freely available.

The simplest way to switch to a different language is to select Tools > Options > Language > Download Additional Languages from within FeedDemon.  From there you can select the language file you wish to use, and FeedDemon will take care of downloading and installing it.

PS: These language files were created by customers who simply wanted FeedDemon to be available in their native language.  It's a tedious process creating these translations, so we owe a big "thank you" to those who spent their time working on them.

Digital Inspiration: Read Foreign-Language Blogs with FeedDemon 25 Jan 2010, 7:02 pm

Digital Inspiration has a nice overview of the new translate feature in FeedDemon 3.1.  I love the animated GIF they created to demonstrate this feature!

Introducing FeedDemon 3.1 23 Jan 2010, 11:15 pm

I'm very pleased to announce the availability of FeedDemon 3.1.  Despite the minor version change, this is a significant release – there are some major new features which I think you're going to love.

If you're in a hurry and don't want to read the rest of this post, you can check out the release notes for details on what's new, or you can skip all that and simply download FeedDemon 3.1 right now.

Still with me?  Good!  I'd like to introduce you to some of the new features…

FeedDemon 3.1 Gets Social

My favorite new feature is "Shared by People I Follow."  If you're following people in Google Reader, their shared items now appear in FeedDemon, and as I mentioned in my previous post, these shared items are included when finding and suggesting popular items.  I've found this to be a great way to uncover interesting articles in feeds I'm not subscribed to.

When an article has been shared by someone, their profile photo appears next to it so you can easily identify who shared it.  To view posts shared by a specific person, just click their photo.

If you're not following anyone, FeedDemon makes it really easy to find people to follow – just enter a few keywords:

…and FeedDemon shows a list of people with matching profiles:

Click "Preview" to view a newspaper containing recently shared items from that person, or just click "Follow" to follow them right away.  If you get tired of someone, select "Show People I Follow" and click "Unfollow" to stop following them.

Filtering Content

In the past you were forced to see every article from every feed you're subscribed to, but now you can use FeedDemon 3.1's "Content Filters" to hide the stuff you don't care about.  Just create a content filter, assign it to whichever feeds you like, and articles in those feeds matching the filter will be marked read as soon as they arrive so you don't see them.

Content filters can be used to either include or exclude articles based on your keywords – and if you subscribe to a feed which has several different authors, you can use a content filter to show or hide articles from specific authors.

I personally use this feature to deal with all the high-traffic tech feeds I'm subscribed to which rarely talk about things I care about.  Now instead of seeing every single article, I have a content filter which automatically hides stuff that doesn't interest me.

Translate Item

I'm subscribed to a lot of search feeds that tell me when someone blogs or tweets about FeedDemon, which really helps me stay in touch with how people feel about my work.  Quite often I'll see something written in a different language, so I have to translate it in order to figure out what it says – a time-consuming process, especially when there are several items that need translating.

FeedDemon 3.1 solves this with the addition of the "translate" icon which now appears beneath each item.  Simply click this icon and FeedDemon will translate the item into your language.

Performance Improvements

If you've used my software for a long time, then you probably know I'm a performance freak.  I hate waiting for software to perform a task, and I figure you do, too, so I spend a lot of time figuring out how to squeeze as much speed out my software as possible.  In fact, the name "FeedDemon" was intended as a play on the phrase "speed demon."

So it really bothered me when I read several complaints about FeedDemon 3.0 being slow.  Even though a lot of people found v3.0 to be significantly faster than previous versions, some people reported just the opposite.  I privately contacted several customers who reported performance problems and asked for their help in figuring out what was going wrong.

The end result?  We found out why it was performing slowly, and every one of these customers has told me that FeedDemon 3.1 is once again the speed demon it used to be.  If you ran into performance issues with the previous release, I urge you to upgrade to version 3.1.  If after upgrading you still find it to be slow, try selecting File > Manage Cache > Compact to defragment FeedDemon's database (a few customers have reported that doing this made a big difference).

And Lots of Small Stuff

So that's a look at the major new features, but as with every release, there are tons of small improvements, changes and fixes in FeedDemon 3.1, all of which are covered in the release notes.

Download FeedDemon 3.1

PS: If you have any questions about the new version, rather than post a comment here, I recommend asking in the FeedDemon Support Group instead.

Perfect Attention (With a Little Help from My Friends) 26 Dec 2009, 11:34 pm

Back in the summer of 2007, I wrote this post about how aggregators should be able to find articles that interest you by paying attention to what people like you are reading.  It's a very simple idea – after all, if 10 people you know all like the same article, then there's a pretty good chance you'll like it, too.  But as is often the case, the simplest ideas often take the longest to implement.

Using an aggregator like FeedDemon ensures that you'll see stuff that interests you because you usually only subscribe to feeds you find interesting.  But there are tons of feeds you don't know about that may interest you, so there's a good chance you're missing a lot of articles you'd enjoy.

The traditional approach to solving this problem has been to show you the stuff that's interesting to everyone (even "mainstream" news sites like CNN show the popularity of each article).  But I personally hate this approach because it shows me so much stuff I don't care about it.  For example, a lot of people may find the latest antics of pop culture icons interesting, but I couldn't care less.

I don't want to see articles about Britney Spears, I don't want to know how many women Tiger Woods slept with, and I don't care if Kanye just made an ass out of himself.  But I do want to know if Google has an interesting new service, or if Microsoft released a new development tool, or if someone declared that RSS is dead (again).  And I also want to know when someone has written a great response to an article that interests me.

So knowing what everyone is paying attention to doesn't interest me, but knowing what people like me are paying attention to is very interesting.  I've tried to tackle this in FeedDemon for quite a while with little to show for it, but when Google Reader added the ability to follow people, I knew it was the "secret sauce" to finally solving this problem.

Long story short: the next build of FeedDemon will include articles from people you follow in Google Reader, and these articles will help fuel the "Popular in My Subscriptions" page which until now has shown only the articles that are popular in feeds you subscribe to.  I've been using a build of FeedDemon with this feature enabled (here's a screenshot), and it has brought me tons of interesting articles that I would otherwise has missed (many of which I've added to my Shared Items feed).

PS: I should add that if you only see stuff that's interesting to people you follow, then there's a risk that you'll end up wearing blinders and miss "general interest" articles that may be relevant to you.  For this reason, FeedDemon also looks at the feeds you're subscribed to and figures out which articles in those feeds have been "liked" the most by everyone (not just people you follow), and it interweaves those articles into the "Popular in My Subscriptions" page.

Automatic Feed Translation in FeedDemon 16 Dec 2009, 8:25 pm

The next build of FeedDemon (coming soon!) adds a couple of features that should be a hit with those who subscribe to feeds in other languages.

Thanks to the work of the Google Reader and Google Translate teams, FeedDemon will be able to automatically translate these feeds into your language.  Suppose, for example, you only speak English, and you subscribe to a feed which contains this:

Simply enable the new "Translate into my language" setting in the feed's properties when you subscribe to it, and you'll see this instead:

But what if you subscribe to a feed that usually contains articles in your language, but sometimes it doesn't?  In my case, I subscribe to Twitter search feeds which let me know when people are talking about FeedDemon, and I often see tweets in different languages.  For these situations, I've added a new "Translate item link" icon to FeedDemon's newspaper – just click this icon, and the link will be passed to Google Translate and translated into your language.

How To: Add Support for goo.gl and fb.me to FeedDemon's Short URL Preview 14 Dec 2009, 11:15 pm

One of my favorite features in FeedDemon is the short URL preview, which displays a balloon tip containing the long URL when you mouse over a short URL, like this:

FeedDemon has built-in support for over two dozen URL shortening services, but new ones seem to appear all the time.  Today, for example, Google announced their goo.gl shortener, and Facebook recently rolled out their FB.me shortener.

Both of these services will be supported in the next FeedDemon 3.x release (coming soon), but if you don't want to wait, it's easy to add support for them right now.  Just look for the file ShortUrl.xml in FeedDemon's \Data subfolder, then open it in your favorite XML editor (I use TopStyle 4).

The domain of each URL shortener is listed in this XML file as a separate <service> entry, so supporting goo.gl and fb.me is as simple as adding two entries to this file:

After you save the changes, the next time you run FeedDemon it will automatically expand short URLs from both fb.me and goo.gl.

You can add other URL shorteners the same way, provided that they return the long URL in the location header after doing a HEAD request.  Almost all shorteners do this (including youtu.be), but some redirect to an HTML page before redirecting to the actual long URL, and some use their own HTML page containing an IFRAME which hosts the long URL.  These services can't be supported.

Thinking Out Loud: What Should I Learn Next? 4 Dec 2009, 9:15 pm

Now that I'm an independent developer again, I've been giving a lot of thought to what I should learn next.  I still love Delphi for developing Windows desktop apps, but I've been doing that for (holy shit!) 15 years now and it's waayyy past time for me to update my skills.

I had been leaning towards iPhone development, and I even attended Macworld to get a feel for the development community.  But as wonderful as the iPhone developers I met were, I'm completely turned off by the way Apple handles their App Store.  Having a one-stop shopping source for the iPhone is great – I'd love to have something similar on Windows so customers wouldn't have to fill out their personal information every time they want to buy software online – but Apple's lack of respect for their developers killed any interest I have in iPhone or Mac development.

The obvious choice, then, is for me to drop desktop/single-device development completely and create web-based software.  Nothing for customers to install – they just browse to a URL to use my app.  The trick, of course, is to create a web app that people are willing to pay for.  I'm not one of those developers who wants to rely on VC financing to stay afloat while they figure out a business model, and I'm far from convinced that every web developer can earn a living from advertising (yes, I recognize the irony of me saying that).  Having a family to support sort of kills the willingness to create something and hope it somehow makes money down the road (I mean, have you seen the cost of health insurance these days?).

Strangely enough, I find myself leaning towards sticking with Windows development.  I say "strangely enough" because I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft, and I cringe every time I see a Microsoft app favor geekiness over simplicity and usability.  But lately I've been impressed with what they're coming up with.  Their moves with Azure, Silverlight and .NET are impressive and show that they're not down for the count.  For the time being it may not be "cool" to develop for Windows, but if you care about being cool, then WTF are you doing being a geek in the first place?  I'm perfectly fine being anti-cool if it enables me to keep my family covered and develop software that tons of people use.

So…if you've read this far, then there's a good chance you're a developer and not just someone who uses my software.  If so, what would you do in my shoes?  What platform and development tool(s) would you focus on now?

FeedDemon 3.0.0.45: Recommendations and Faster Synchronization 17 Nov 2009, 6:13 pm

FeedDemon 3.0.0.45 is now available, and as you can see from the screenshot below, it now offers recommendations.   Powered by Google Reader's new explore feature, FeedDemon's recommendations report shows a single view containing feeds and articles recommended for you.  If you'd like more details, Digital Inspiration has a nice overview of how this feature works.

This new build also offers faster and more efficient synchronization, especially when you have a lot of synched tags or are using a slow connection.

If you have any questions or comments about this new release, please stop by the FeedDemon 3.0 Support Forum and we'll be happy to help out.