14 DAY TRIAL // In an email to its customers today, NewsGator has made the announcement that its best-of-breed consumer RSS applications now work with Google Reader, which will become the online companion and the synchronization platform for FeedDemon and NetNewsWire. Also, the company will cease developing some of its products starting September 1st.
Thus the free versions of NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Go! and NewsGator's RSS features (Shared Clipped Feed, Blogroll, Ratings, Headlines, Browser Toolbar, and Desktop Notifier) will reach an end on August 31st. However, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire's development will carry on for both free and paid versions.
Transition details to Google Reader for the remaining apps are provided on NewsGator's website. Unless you have the latest version of FeedDemon, you won't be able to migrate to Google Reader for online synchronization. The transition does not take long, and syncing is faster than before, but, at this moment, it shows some flaws. For instance, the moment you synchronize the feeds with Google Reader, they will have all the feeds marked as read. A downfall, indeed, but consider that this is happening just once and after that it's smooth, fast surfing.
Also, in this version of FeedDemon synchronization failures may happen. In one of our tests, Google Reader miscarried the operation and the result was the omission of a folder in the list and the incapacity of reading the titles of two feeds. Regardless of whether this is because of the Windows application or Google Reader, there is still a month available before having to make the transition to the new online feed carrier.
The new FeedDemon has changed in terms of features, and besides the new, online feed synchronization modification, there is also tagging, which allows assigning keywords to items for an easier organization. “Really simple sharing” is another novelty for the application, designed to add items to the RSS feed for the shared clippings. There is also short URL preview that displays a balloon tip showing the location of the web address (no more blind clicking).
Twitter feeds are also easier to handle and the interface suffered some changes (it no longer has a toolbar). There is a new start page, which includes popular articles and YouTube videos from your subscribed feeds.
