I’ve been using FeedDemon for reading news, and I really like it, but as with many software packages, I’m seeing little cracks here and there that will eventually bug me to the point that I’m annoyed by the software as a whole. And that’s never a good thing.
So here are a few ideas I had for something that would please me, and you’re welcome to bash or agree as you see fit. Some of these are things the FeedDemon does that I like, but you’ll also note things in this list that FeedDemon doesn’t do.
- Mozilla!
- Integrate with Bloglines for feed updates.
- Automatically sync feed list to/from FTP or WebDAV for use on more than one desktop.
- Integrate with some as-yet unwritten web-based RSS reader installed on my server. (Maybe the web app just uses the uploaded OPML-like file used for sync?)
- Update all feeds on a refresh schedule, not just the ones in the active folder, and be able to specify refresh intervals for folders or even individual feeds.
- Program feeds to automatically download enclosures.
- Create an integrated newspaper-like (paginated!) view of all new news items that shuffles articles by age, not by feed. Should include photos, too.
- Enable easy PubSub subscriptions via RSS
- More easily track RSS feeds for post comments where I leave coments. (So I can be rid of Sage forever.)
- Minimize to the tray.
- Report minor feed validation errors (like entities), but still freaking work
- Successfully blog entries on WordPress via XMLRPC.
- Faster cache cleanup of old entries.
- Mark individual items or entire feeds for archival in a searchable form.
- Easy Furl/Delicious bookmarking and tagging.
- Autotagging content based on feed source, embedded keywords, or feed source search terms (like those used in PubSub).
- Aggregate channels (combining "WordPress gallery" and "WordPress photos" searches from PubSub into a single "virtual feed").
- Allows "mark single post as read" from the aggregate list without first viewing a single entry.
Well, that’s a first pass at a brainstorm. I mean, this is five minutes of thought and some of these are darn good features. What’s up with software designers imaginations these days? Everyone is doing only what everyone else is doing.
