I have been testing Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon for the last week or so. This RSS headline reader from the creator of HomeSite and TopStyle simply has me floored. I have never been this addicted to RSS feeds since they were invented by Al Gore. As always, Nick includes a well thought out GUI with pleasant looking icons and functional button placement. What you notice off the bat is that Nick spent some time thinking about how people read, organize and use RSS feeds.

The basic paradigm at work here is the concept that all channels will fit under a listing. The listing serves as a categorical designation to group channels with a common them together. This works very well and keeps the information overload to a bare minimum. Along with this listing/channel paradigm come 2 of my favorite features.

The Watches work as search channels. You can create watches that will scan all updated feeds for keywords that you supply. In a sense, it is a search that acts as a metachannel synthesizing relevant info from the bundles of RSS feeds that are available.

Another ingenious idea is that of the News Bin. These News Bins are places where you can store articles for later reading or just because you particular like that article and want to make sure it doesn’t get pruned or deleted.

I don’t want to get to deep into all the features, but there is a beta available for download and evaluation. I think this is the finest RSS reader out there and from past experience with Nick and all his projects, it will only get better. You should certainly check out the newsgroups and leave any feedback that you have or just read some of the ideas floating around. I will let you in on a small secret: soon there will be a community-based site surround FeedDemon and the other Bradsoft products.