News

We have been developing Feedreader for 8 years. Most of these years RSS was only about periodical fetching of articles and displaying results when you wanted to read the latest updates. There were a few portals and blogs. This means that we could easily take one hour in the middle of the day and get up to date with latest news and happenings. This is equally true about personal interests (latest gadgets, gossip, ...) and also about company interests (what are your competitors doing).
 
All this has changed now. There’s so much information to consume and work through. It’s not easy to read through 100 feeds and track your competitors steps. What is the solution?

Quite often our users underestimate the power of Feedreader OEM. We are talking mostly about Feedreader OEM as version that you could brand as your own RSS reader including your application name, colors, styles and so on. But there's additional functionality in Feedreader OEM that can be used in corporate environments. So if you are in charge of corporate computing environment here are some really good reasons why Feedreader OEM could and should be good for you...

Some days ago we silently released Feedreader Connect Server. This is big news for us. It took over a year to finally introduce server version of Feedreader.

Feedreader Connect Server is a version of Feedreader that runs on enterprise grade databases (currently on Microsoft SQL Server 2005, later on MySQL and Oracle databases) and provides user/developer with various methods of integrating feeds and articles with user's everyday information flow or 3rd party applications.

We are proud to announce release of Feedreader 3.11.

Changes:

• New experimental feature added - now it's possible to show notification in some feed/smartfeed with added importance. This means that notification pops up in the middle of screen, it's highlighted and also it does not time out after some seconds. This means that user gets notification even if he/she is away from computer.
• Made it possible to change behavior of minimize button
• There is new connection test functionality. You can find it from connection options or when there is problem with new feed adding. This functionality helps to track connection problems and problems with proxies.
• Disabled Javascript on local webpages (ie articles) because of security reasons. If you really need to enable Javascript on local webpages, please add enablejavascriptonlocalpages=1 to feedreader.ini under [misc] section
• Added new command under Enclosure Browser - "Generate playlist from selected files". This creates playlist from selected files, you can use playlist for example in Winamp.
• Reworked enclosure downloading a little bit (bottom left corner). Now it shows downloading progress in better manner and download box header has more consistent look.
• It's possible to download password protected enclosures from password protected feeds.
• It's possible to use alternate row coloring in Feedreader if you add alternaterowcoloring=1 under [misc] section in Feedreader.
• Tab orders changed in options dialogs
• Passive mode added for FTP synchonization
• Fixed some bugs that were introduced in 3.10 and were about articles view scrolling.
• We tried to get column sizes and positions to save correctly.
• We changed program license a little bit to state that Feedreader can also be used in corporate environment without need to pay any license fees.
• For Feedreader OEM version we added feature that lets you use local files or network server locations (\\server\share\file.xml) as feed.
• Korean translation added
• Japanese translation added
• Chinese translations added

Please download Feedreader 3.11 from here.

I guess that among other products in our homepage you have also seen information about Feedreader Connect Server. If you have read about it then you know that it's server version of Feedreader. It's quite hard to demonstrate the features of server products because in most cases they to not have any user interface. In these cases at least I'd like to see administrator interface of server product to get to know applications functions. Unfortunatelly till this time we did not have administrator interface screenshots available. This will changed from now.

 
I have created walkthrough of Feedreader Connect Administrator with brief descriptions of its functionality. It's available in slideshow (please click on (I) image to show descriptions inline) or gallery format. You are welcome to meet Feedreader Connect Administrator.

 
Feedreader Connect Server is standalone Windows Service Application that does everything that normal Feedreader does with the added bonus that it will make it extra easy to export information found in articles to whatever format using whatever medium. Feedreader Connect Server uses MS SQL as database backend. This makes it to play in absolutely another league then compared to normal Feedreader. Feedreader Connect Server can easily track tens of thousands of feeds at the same time.

We are announcing Feedreader 3.10 today. It can be downloaded from here.

Changes:

• Fixes to enclosure downloading
• Fixes to timezone related functions
• Now you can copy from feed editbox (it was not possible before)
• Published options for duplicate grouping and ratings.
• Printing from minibrowser window works now
• Lots of internal fixes to Newsbrain engine (engine for feed updating and so on).

When we started developing completely new Feedreader3 about one and half years ago one big functional request was to separate user interface and database engine. This gave us a really nice result – if we subtract Feedreader user interface from Feedreader3 all that is left is a really powerful feed management component that can easily refresh thousands of feeds and offer all the features that Feedreader3 has. We called this component Newsbrain.

We are using Newsbrain in multiple applications. It's included in desktop version of Feedreader. And it's also included in Feedreader Connect Enterprise.


So what exactly is Feedreader Connect Enterprise? Feedreader has always made it possible for users to search and find specific information from big number of articles. For this we developed smartfeeds. But what if you really want to create persistent smartfeed that searches for information from a lot of portals and newspapers. One possibility is to use one of multiple web services that offer this kind of functionality (google, technorati,...). But what if this is not enough and you have specific needs? Then comes the Feedreader Connect Enterprise.


Feedreader Connect Enterprise is basically a special high performance version of Feedreader that runs as Microsoft Windows Service (without user interface) and uses Microsoft SQL Server as backend.


To view the possibilities of Feedreader Connect Enterprise from more practical point let me tell you about real world usage example for this application.

We are proud to release Feedreader version 3.09 today. You can download it from Feedreader download page. New features and additions :

• Database cleansing
• Article synchronization between multiple computers
• Favorite icons support
• Save favorite articles to Archive
• Change font in Feedreader
• Newsbar
• Notification window fixes
• Article ratings / Attention data
• Other additions

More extensive discussion about new features is here.

We are glad to announce Developer Blog. You can always keep up to date with our development progress then subscribing to this blog.

Developer Blog RSS feed is available here.

We are announcing Feedreader 3.08 today.

Changelog for 3.08:

• Added experimental duplicate article grouping (autoduplicatediscovery=1 and maxdistance=?? if fine tuning is needed)
• Inline article tagging (press "t" while article is active). There's also possibility to tag multiple selected articles at the same time
• Now it's possible to copy multiple selected articles to clipboard. Save them to document or send to a friend at once.
• Starring/flagging article can be done from webview.
• Localized news packages available