Bradbury Software: FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 1 is now available.

Looks good. Looks very good, in fact – but with any beta there are a few hiccups…

Wait – weren’t they still in beta for 1.6? Yeah, well, Nick – and the powers that be – decided to skip it. 1.6 was going to be available as a subscription model – all the users seemed to have freaked. So much for that “subscription is the wave of the future!” stuff. I dig 2.0 so far though. They’ve done away with one-group-per-screen bit and have all of the groups out in a tree. Add to that that the tree will auto collapse nodes as you switch groups, and it’s very, very usable. Add to that a new feature that filters out the unread feeds and it’s kick ass. Basically, I end up with a list (i.e. ListView) of feeds that have items unread. I set Ctrl+Q to mark a feed as read. As feeds get marked as read, the pop outta the list. I can now cruise through my list of “new” items much faster than before!

Problems wise there aren’t that many… just a few hiccups. The new style for the main window is interesting but frustrating. It’s not that “readable” which I blame on the font being used. Also, if you Shift+Click any of the FeedDemon links in that window, you get an error message from IE… since I usually cruise through the list and open a bunch of pages – to read later – this is a bigger problem than I would have though.

Also, the did away with the Default style, which I think might be a temporary thing… there’s also an occasional feed that is “read” but sticks around in the filtered list, but that is minor.

All in all it’s a worthy successor to FeedDemon 1.x, especially since it still supports sync’ing with NewsGator!