My 2 cents on RSS Aggregators
Here are my 2 cents on RSS Aggregators :
I've been using SharpReader for 6 months now, but it's lack of features (such as flagging interested items, creating search folders, etc.) makes me wanna switch to another aggregator. I think I've tested almost all aggregators available out there, but FeedDemon and RSS Bandit were the most interesting to me.
Like many others, I've been pretty disappointed by the bad responsiveness and slowlyness of previous versions of RSS Bandit, thus, making me stay with SharpReader. But, Steve Eichert recently tested the new version and said that RSS Bandit finally worth the switch since it's now much more responsive. So, I decided to give it another try and all I can say, is that the responsiveness has been really increased. It's still not as good as SharpReader, but it's now useable ! I don't really like the way RSS Bandit graphically represents the "refreshing" process of the feeds (SharpReader and FeedDemon does this really well), but it's ability to flag and create search folders worth the switch I think...
What about FeedDemon ? Well, it's really nice graphically and technically. The responsiveness is damn good. First thing that bothers me, is that FeedDemon it's not free. Well, that's not really important... The main problem of FeedDemon to me is the way it lets you classify your subscriptions. FeedDemon should defintively have adopted a treeview with n-level of deepness. The Channel Group with the combobox is just unuseable !!! You have to switch between each channel group to be able to refresh all your feeds, and to see if you have unread items. That's the show stopper to me.
At the memory consumption level, RSS Bandit doesn't do much better than SharpReader. They both eat like 100~120 Mb of RAM ! I just wonder why they do load everything up in memory... FeedDemon is the best for this point.
In conclusion, I'm still unsatisfied with available RSS aggregators, so that's why I'm going to work again on the one I created a few month ago : http://www.myblogroll.com, a web-based RSS aggregator. So, if you're like me, unsatisfied of available RSS aggregators and interested in a web based one, just stay tuned !