Primary changes between RSS Bandit v1.0d and v1.1 are
  • New improved GUI courtesy of the Magic Library. Compare old look to new look and marvel at the difference.

  • Support for nested categories. For example, one can have a "News" category and under that have a "Technology" category which contains feeds for Technology publications.

  • Tabbed browsing.

  • Better proxy support. Specifically there is now an option for specifying username and password.

  • Themable newsfeed display pane. . Themes are XSLT stylesheets. (Default theme) ( Slashdot theme)

  • Plugin architecture via IBlogExtension interface. Just drop an assembly with your extension into the "plugins" folder and watch magic happen the next time RSS Bandit is launched. Here's a screenshot using a modified version of Doug Purdy's EmailThisPlugin sample.

  • Drag & drop between RSS Bandit and various Microsoft Office applications.

  • Better support for HTTP 301 responses from server. If a feed has been permanently moved then the feed link is permanently updated so redundant HTTP queries aren't made on subsequent requests.

  • GZip encoding supported on HTTP requests to reduce bandwidth on servers. Thanks to #ziplib

  • More complete support for RFC 822 dates in pubDate fields of various RSS feeds.

  • Real-time tracking of number of unread messages

  • Integrated Search Bar

  • Related posts are linked to each other in a hierarchical threaded fashion reminiscent of news and mail readers.

  • User details for responses posted via the CommentAPI can now be stored to prevent having to always re-enter them. This is useful when posting to weblogs that support the CommentAPI

There are a number of ideas and features that got punted until a future release. The main ones being my much talked about autoupdate feature and some work on improving performance. Although some would consider the current performance costs to be an adoption blocker

On a slightly related note Matt Griffith asks for functionality that's been in RSS Bandit since version 1.0. The primary reason I started work on RSS Bandit was because aggregators didn't provide a portable way to serialize feed information besides scanty OPML files. Maybe more news aggregators should use the feed list format described my Building a Desktop News Aggregator article.
 

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