Things have been progressing well with RSS Bandit development recently. Some of our recent changes seem so valuable to me that I’ve been flirting with throwing out all our plans for Phoenix and shipping a new release right away. That’s how much I like the personalized meme tracking feature. I also fixed a bug where we continually fetch favicons for all your feeds if one of the sites in your subscriptions gives us an invalid image when we fetch its favicon. This bug affects me personally since a lot of RSS Bandit users are subscribed to my site and are polling my favicons several times an hour instead of once every startup or less. 

Despite those thoughts, we will continue with our plan to add the top 5 features for the next version of RSS Bandit which I blogged about last month. I need to do some fit & finish work this weekend on the meme tracking feature and then it is on to the next set of tasks. Torsten will be looking at ways to add UI for managing your pending and downloaded podcasts. I will be working on adding support for treating the Windows RSS platform and Newsgator Online as “Feed Sources”. This will mean that you can use RSS Bandit in standalone mode and as a desktop client for feeds that you are either sharing with Newsgator applications  (FeedDemon, NewsGator Online, Net News Wire, etc) or Windows RSS platform applications (Internet Explorer 7, Outlook 2007, etc).

For a long time, people have been asking for me to treat services like Newsgator Online in the same way an email client like Outlook treats mail servers like Exchange instead of the arms length degree of integration I’ve done in the past. It’s taken a while but I’m now going to go ahead and do just that.  

With that done, we’d probably have enough new features to ship an alpha and start getting initial feedback. I estimate that this will happen sometime in the first quarter of 2008. I also plan to go over our backlog of bugs during the holiday season and will knock out as many as I can before the alpha.

If you have any questions or comments, fire away. I’m all ears.

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