FeedDemon™ 1.5 Release Notes

FeedDemon 1.5 Beta 3a

• Added: "Open FeedStation" added to Tools menu
• Added: Performance improvements to newspaper generation (most notable with large newspapers)
• Fixed: Parser error in newspaper
• Fixed: Double-clicking a news item when the browser is hidden does nothing
• Fixed: Enclosure column is hidden whenever flagged column is hidden
• Fixed: Text on new channel wizard cut off when running with large fonts

FeedDemon 1.5 Beta 3

• Added: Podcasting supporting via FeedDemon FeedStation (details...)
• Added: "Podcasters" channel group. If you don't see this group, you can add it from the "Default Channel Groups" page of the welcome screen (Help > Show Welcome).
• Added: Category filter added to "Add Channel" and "Sychronized Channel Group" dialogs, which enables filtering the list of channels by their category (as defined in the OPML file). This should significantly simplify the process of separate creating channel groups from specific categories in large OPML files, as well as make it much easier to create separate channel groups for each Bloglines category.
• Added: Performance improvements to downloading and parsing feeds
• Added: Significant performance and memory usage improvements when switching between channels containing a large number of items
• Added: "Unread or Flagged" added to newspaper filter
• Changed: Restoring from the system tray now requires only a single click on the FeedDemon tray icon.
• Fixed: Incorrect parsing of descriptions that have text before CDATA
• Fixed: "Expando" style links don't work on XP SP2, and images overlap content
• Fixed: Access violation when adding Bloglines or NewsGator channel whose title contains a CR or LF
• Fixed: Exception when attempting to display desktop alert when screensaver is active
• Fixed: FeedDemon doesn't start in the correct position when split between monitors on a multimon system
• Fixed: FeedDemon's browser only keeps the last two newspapers in its history
• Fixed: Homepage URL for Bloglines feeds is often incorrect
• Fixed: When adding a new channel, special characters show as entities in the channel title
• Fixed: Crash at startup when launched by ActiveWords
• Fixed: Channel bar tooltip displays over other dialogs
• Fixed: Subscribing to a secure feed on a site with an invalid security certificate fails without giving an indication of the problem
• Fixed: Selecting all items then choosing "Toggle news item flag" fails to toggle the first item beneath each group

FeedDemon 1.5 Beta 2

• Added: Default channel groups in "Welcome" wizard are now displayed as a tree which enables choosing the channels in each group
• Added: "Expando" style, based on a combination of Techno-Weenie's SimpleCollapsible style and Michael Sippey's two-pane aggregator style
• Added: Category column added to the list of feeds displayed when importing an OPML file (displays the category from the OPML)
• Changed; Support for Bloglines and Newsgator synchronization has been re-designed. Instead of selecting "New Channel Group," you now choose the new "New Synchronized Channel Group" feature.
• Changed: Support for color-coded modified items has been dropped. Sorry to do this, but this feature turned out to be unreliable due to the fact that most modifications were simply punctuation or typo corrections, leading to numerous items being colored as modified even though their content hadn't really changed. Note, though, that FeedDemon will still update news items in Atom feeds if their modified date has changed.
• Changed: Several newspaper styles have been removed from the install and placed on the "Download Styles" page
• Changed: In previous versions, empty values in the news item list showed "(empty)" but now the values are left blank
• Fixed: Can't subscribe to empty Atom feeds
• Fixed: FeedDemon doesn't honor the "show external links in default browser" setting when you browse a channel's home page
• Fixed: Focused news item changes after purging older news items following a channel update
• Fixed: Newspaper preview fails if FeedDemon's temp folder has been deleted
• Fixed: Feeds with unescaped content in their descriptions don't show all items
• Fixed: Watches and news bins are listed unsorted on computers with FAT file systems
• Fixed: Entities in author element confuse FeedDemon's XML parser
• Fixed: Access violation reported after returning from screen saver
• Fixed: Access violation after deleting a channel group
• Fixed: Feeds which contain a <style>..</style> block in every item display incorrectly (seen with flickr feeds)
• Fixed: Empty title shown in news item list for items with an ampersand as the last character in their title
• Fixed: Consecutively hitting Ctrl+T to open a new browser tab causes address bar to dropdown
• Fixed: Access violation when running a watch or search on all channels
• Fixed: Resource leak when loading favicon
• Fixed: Hand cursor over channel list doesn't show shadow
• Fixed: XML parser incorrectly handles empty <description/> elements
• Fixed: Uninstall fails to remove several FeedDemon registry items
• Fixed: Uninstall fails to remove FavIcon cache folder

FeedDemon 1.5 Beta 1a

• Added: Integration with NewsGator Online Services, which works much like the integration with Bloglines
• Fixed: Two status bars are shown instead of one
• Fixed: Alternate row colors don't work in the news item list
• Fixed: Mousing over an channel's unread count doesn't highlighted the channel

FeedDemon 1.5 Beta 1

• Added: Integration with Bloglines for easy feed synchronization. For details, please visit our site.
• Added: Favicons are now shown in the channel bar, on browser tabs and in various other areas. This can be disabled on the Appearance tab in options. Note that in order to conserve bandwidth, each channel's favicon isn't downloaded until the feed has been updated, so it may take a few days for some favicons to appear.
• Added: FeedDemon now reflects modifications made to items that have already been downloaded. For example, if the feed author changes the description of an item that has already been downloaded, FeedDemon will reflect those changes. Items that have been modified are drawn using the "Modified Color" specified on the Appearance page in FeedDemon's options. Modified items in the active channel are no longer considered modified after switching to a different channel.
  Important: This is only supported for feeds that uniquely identify each item through the <guid> element.
• Added: Modified date added to available columns in the news item list. This will be blank the majority of the time.
• Added: Ctrl+Alt+Home shortcut for "Channel Home"
• Added: Support for RFC329 with "feed"
• Added: Alternate rows in the news item grid use a different background color. The color can be changed on the Appearance tab in options.
• Added: Moreover added as "Search Channel" engine
• Added: New "TwoCube" newspaper style
• Added: When a feed returns HTTP status code 410 (gone), FeedDemon now prompts to unsubscribe from it
• Added: "Hide unflagged items" added to view menu
• Added: Filter toolbar now contains "Hide unread items" and "Hide unflagged items" buttons
• Added: "New browser tab" toolbutton added above browser
• Added: "Next channel group" toolbutton added to channel bar
• Added: "Clear stored items" added to local search and web search
• Added: "Category" added to available columns and "Group By" selection in the news item list
• Added: Drag-and-dropping any URL onto the "New Channel" button displays the "New Channel" wizard
• Added: Drag-and-dropping a feed URL onto the channel bar now shows the "New Channel" wizard
• Added: "Export All Groups to OPML File" added to File menu. This will create a single, categorized OPML file containing all of your subscriptions.
• Added: Enclosure icon in newspaper now includes URL in tooltip
• Added: Starting FeedDemon with the command line /ua performs an "Update all groups" as soon as FeedDemon starts
• Added: If Shift key is held down while selecting from favorites menu, the URL is opened in a new tab
• Changed: When changing the location of FeedDemon's cache, you are now asked whether to move your existing data to the new folder
• Changed: The "Hide unread" and "Copy link address" menu items have been removed from the news item list's context menu
• Changed: The menu item "Synchronize Group with Online Directory" has been renamed "Synchronize Channel Group with OPML File"
• Changed: The "Synchronize Group" wizard now uses a tab control to separate new channels from deleted channels
• Changed: The "New Channel" wizard no longer displays a validation warning with feeds that start with whitespace (first noticed with MSDN feeds)
• Changed: In previous versions, FeedDemon defaulted to marking a news item as read after being viewed for three seconds. This has been changed to zero seconds (ie: as soon as an item is clicked, it's marked as read)
• Fixed: Feeds whose descriptions contain multiple, consecutive CDATA sections are parsed and displayed incorrectly. Note that the fix for this problem may result in temporary duplication of items in feeds that use this technique (such as Boing Boing's feed).
• Fixed: Items in Feedster feeds show empty descriptions. Note that the fix for this problem may result in temporary duplication of items in Feedster feeds.
• Fixed: The RSS and OPML export features now use MSXML to ensure that valid XML is exported. This resolves a number of issues involving exported RSS/OPML.
• Fixed: In rare cases, <style> tags were not removed from feed content
• Fixed: Malformed enclosure URLs cause XML error in newspaper
• Fixed: Channel group dropdown cuts off long group names
• Fixed: <Escape> doesn't close "Manage Groups"
• Fixed: Links preceded by white space inside CDATA sections are browsed incorrectly by the embedded IE
• Fixed: Last update date/time incorrectly shown in hints for news bins and watches
• Fixed: URLs containing quotes aren't correctly escaped in FeedDemon's newspaper, resulting in an XML error
• Fixed: Browser swallows the mouse focus from the news item list, so that clicking news item list has no effect. This bug was seen primarily when browsing pages containing form controls which received the focus through JavaScript. This fix also corrects the problem in which the news item list gets focused simply by moving the mouse over it.
• Fixed: After downloading a feed, FeedDemon writes it to IE's cache. This didn't cause any problems, but was unnecessary.
• Fixed: Relative paths in feeds aren't correctly handled if a relative link is used in the feed's home page link (discovered with Sam Ruby's Atom feed)
• Fixed: Browser doesn't resize correctly when restoring window on a multi-monitor system
• Fixed: When the channel bar is scrolled down, it doesn't scroll back to the top after switching channel groups
• Fixed: Icirc/icirc missing from FeedDemon's entity table

Note to translators: Strings added or updated in this release are marked in English.fdlang with a <!-- 1.5 --> comment. At this point I don't recommend translating since there will be more changes in subsequent betas, but if you want to translate the FDLANG, please be aware that the "version" attribute of the <language> element must be set to "1.5".

Known Issues

Technical Support

Minimum System Requirements