Adam Bosworth has a blog but not an RSS feed. (Is that possible? I'm not sure. I'm a bit of a newbie/moron at this stuff.) It would be nice if there were a way to quickly click through to sites that aren't rss. I realize the "rtclick/this feed/view source will get me there, but it seems redundant/painful if I already know there is no rss feed. Of course since Adam seldom updates the site maybe I should just quit checking in on it, but then one of the nice things about Bandit/rss is that I don't have to go checking, the "agent" does it for me, as I think it should.

Two minor features I'd like to see:

1) A way to turn off the balloon tip notifying of new items. I can't minimize Bandit without that thing popping up every couple minutes. Very annoying.

2) Have the feed items per category sorted in memory by date so that when you click on a category in the tree, it lists the most recent ones immediately, inlcuding the new ones. However SharpReader does it. That way you don't have to wait for all the old items to be insterted before you see the new ones. I use both readers and have similiar categories with the same amount of feeds. Sharpreader displays them instantly (so it seems), while Bandit takes awhile to load all the old ones, then I get to watch the new ones be inserted. (And when I try to click on a new one, I usually hit the wrong one since something else got inserted and the list moved)

RSS Bandit has matured to the point where I have no further qualms about abandoning NewsGator. All the features I need have been implemented and it looks like a solid piece of software.

If you plan to continue development once RSS Bandit is considered feature complete, it would be very helpful if you could spend some time polishing the UI to make it more customizable and easier to use. One thing that would really help is allowing users to rebind key combinations like Control+M and Control+R.
Another thing is allowing control+backspace to do 'delete last word' instead of 'insert silly box' in the Post Reply dialog, although this may have broader implications than I'm aware of.


Otherwise, this is a lovely program and I'm deeply grateful for the time and energy you've put into it.

Keep up the good work!

Delete posts? ;)

Item #1
Here's a pretty hard one maybe, but it's come up more than once. It's easier to describe what I'm looking for, I think, as I'd use.

During a session, I flag n-many items to make a daily digest of (example: http://sqljunkies.com/weblog/ktegels/posts/932.aspx)
Sometime after I should have been in bed for an hour or two, I get around to writing the digest. That process goes something like: Fire up IE; Navigate to the Blog's interface; start a new article; foreach post { read; read the pointed-to-comment; come up with what I want to say; compose that in the IE window; }

What would be *REALLY* neat would to have a utility that compose an HTML fragment for me of all of group of selected items, sort of slashdot style. e.g.

< a href="url-to-feed" > feed title < / a > wrote: whatever was in the content of their post with the html tags removed < / a >

That would make digesting a lot faster.

I was talking to somebody from our marketing group today and she wants to do essentially the same thing with the various feeds she

Writing the aggregation to an XML file would be ok too. That way I could squirrel away the aggregated items for future reference. Timestamping would be handy too.

Idea #2:
While I like BlogJet, I'd love it if the Bandit had an built in Post editor. One that supported IESpell. Then I wouldn't have to ALT-Tab so much.

Idea #3:
Add http://www.blogsearchengine.com/ to the search blogs. Painfully easy, I'd think.

Idea #4:
I'd certainly vote for Technotti Integration

Idea #5:
If a feed hasn't had a post in n-many days, ask if it should be removed.

Idea #6:
Find FOAF and OPML, like find feeds.

Idea #7:
Consume NNTP, posting to an NNTP feed. Especially helpful if you're helping on the MS news feeds.

That should keep you busy for 20 minutes or so :)

Sorry if this double posts.

Item #1
Here's a pretty hard one maybe, but it's come up more than once. It's easier to describe what I'm looking for, I think, as I'd use.

During a session, I flag n-many items to make a daily digest of (example: http://sqljunkies.com/weblog/ktegels/posts/932.aspx)
Sometime after I should have been in bed for an hour or two, I get around to writing the digest. That process goes something like: Fire up IE; Navigate to the Blog's interface; start a new article; foreach post { read; read the pointed-to-comment; come up with what I want to say; compose that in the IE window; }

What would be *REALLY* neat would to have a utility that compose an HTML fragment for me of all of group of selected items, sort of slashdot style. e.g.

&lt; a href="url-to-feed" &gt; feed title &lt; / a &gt; wrote: whatever was in the content of their post with the html tags removed &lt; / a &gt;

That would make digesting a lot faster.

I was talking to somebody from our marketing group today and she wants to do essentially the same thing with the various feeds she

Writing the aggregation to an XML file would be ok too. That way I could squirrel away the aggregated items for future reference. Timestamping would be handy too.

Idea #2:
While I like BlogJet, I'd love it if the Bandit had an built in Post editor. One that supported IESpell. Then I wouldn't have to ALT-Tab so much.

Idea #3:
Add http://www.blogsearchengine.com/ to the search blogs. Painfully easy, I'd think.

Idea #4:
I'd certainly vote for Technotti Integration

Idea #5:
If a feed hasn't had a post in n-many days, ask if it should be removed.

Idea #6:
Find FOAF and OPML, like find feeds.

Idea #7:
Consume NNTP, posting to an NNTP feed. Especially helpful if you're helping on the MS news feeds.

That should keep you busy for 20 minutes or so :)

Idea #8
Set a default folder for new feeds other than the root.

Idea #9
Provide an default SMTP address for mailto on the category and feed levels.

Idea #10
User defined "flag fors"

Idea #11
"Flag for $x up with this comment"

In Whidbey builds...
Idea #1
Search using XQuery

25 Minutes?

Ah, forgot one. When you import an OPML, have it create a new category, or ask for a name of a new one, or allow you to specify which one it goes into. Importing an OPML with a hundred bloggers, then moving them one by one to a category is a needless pain.

(1) Do not sort categories by name and allow user to change order of items (feeds and categories) within category. Drag and drop preffered, see SharpReader for example.

(2) Retain order of items when importing OPML.

(3) Can we have feed properties (max age, update frequency) in context menu for categories? It will be applicable to all feed in the category, unless there is specific property is set for specific feed.

(4) Lock the toolbars option (?)

Good work, thanks!

I will add my everpresent request for not alphabetizing the feed list and letting me order the entries the way I want too.

"Support synchronizing RSS Bandit state across multiple machines using SIAM." is something I really really want. Nice to know that its first on your list.

Here are a few things I like to see in RSS Bandit:
1. An option to open all links in external browser.
2. A search folder for all unread posts.
3. A special folder listing all feeds not updated in 'n' days. And an easy way to remove such feeds.
4. An option to show only unread posts.

I'd volunteer for Russian l10n.

Another small feature I'd like to have - when a feed cannot be fetched, it's marked with nice red !, but to find out what's wrong I have to go to SpecialFolders/Errors, search for particular message. Instead some shortcut or popup message would be helpful.

btw, I noted some (big?) messages (e.g. Chris Brumme's ones) are shown with no header and footer now.

I'd like to see some kind of synchronization between the different feeds I'm subscribed too. E.g. I'm reading http://weblogs.asp.net/mainfeed.aspx and additionally several individials feeds such as Frans' (http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/rss.aspx). If I read a post by Frans in "his" feed, it should be marked "read" in the weblogs.asp.net mainfeed as well. This shouldn't be too difficult, since the item's GUID is the same.

1. Ability to drag and drop posts into custom folders. Mainly for top posts that I want to save and keep organized.

2. Ability to delete a post via the DEL key.

Usage patterns:

1.USE CASE: File away incredibly useful blog post.
a) Dare writes an informative blog post about XML.
b) I read post and decide I need to be able to reference this often.
c.1) I create a new category folder named XML (maybe under a Favorites folder) and drag and drop the individual post into that folder.
OR
c.2) I use a category tagger to tag the individual post as "XML Dev" and "Reference" (ala iPhoto or Photoshop Album 2.0). I can then search posts by tag.

2. USE CASE: Maintain repository of blog posts
a) new posts come in that are of general interest but not exceptional.
b) I read them and generally keep them where they are for future search and reference.
c) Occasionally I delete individual posts that are uniniteresting in order to keep the post repository light and uncluttered.

Sorry for my plethora of comments, but I have one last. I would better keyboard handling. For example, I like to navigate items via keyboard (suffering from RSI) and use the right arrow to expand a folder and a left arrow to collapse it.

It would be nice to have the option to see only unread items within each feed, although now that leaving things sorted by date works properly the lack of this is less painful.

Great product...loving my RSS feeds for the first time in a while.

Since you asked, and in no particular order, I'd like:

1.) Search Folders: Is there a way to do 'And' 'or' 'Not' in the searches (I am only using 'Text' at the moment)?

2.) Ability to Stop pending downloads; Right click a folder/category and choose 'Stop Download(s)'.

3.) Ability to Stop pending 'Update All Feeds'.

4.) Folder behavior same whether the folder is a feed or a category; categories would have download time behavior associated with them.

5.) Move the update frequency values into XML to allow users to add custom update times.

6.) Access IE 'Favorites'; toolbar or Feed Subscriptions pane (both?).

7.) Ability to associate custom XSLT files to feed/categories/search folders. In effect the 'Feed
Details' pane would display the transformed category. With Search Folders I could see having a page similar to the Google News page displaying information.

8.) Yes on the NNTP.

Thanks for asking!

Why not to simply show the status of "Update all feeds", like Outlook Express Taks?

Dare - it would be cool to have an IE Favourites bar - That would truely kill IE for me

I'd like to see zoom capabilites built in like My IE2 has for web sites. they use the option for ctrl + and - to zoom in on a web page. especially helpful for web pages that choose to use ultra small fonts and don't follow the text size defaults in ie.

I have a few other suggestions:

On the Feed Details tab, have the ability to show/hide the Feed Title. If a

Headline is in 2 or more Feed Title's it would then only be displayed once.

If you attempt to subscribe to a feed to which you've already subsribed, it

would be great to move the the folder in the Feed Subscriptions pane.

In the feed properties tab, have a new property: Last Update Day/Time
Allow Categories to have the same property.

I think THE killer feature of RSSBandit at the moment is the Search Folders.

I would like to see a 'Wizard' or search screen, more like the one in Outlook 2003. Have some common scenerios, and allow searches to be confined to specific categories or sub-categories.

Again, you guys are doing an awesome job, thanks.

My biggest usage scenarios are:

Running the reader on multiple PCs simultaneiously and at different times. I typically use 3 PCs day-to-day: My home PC, my main work PC, and my Tablet that I take to meetings and on trips. I want all my RSS feeds available whereever I am and I want the read flags up-to-date on all of them all the time. Outlook works awsome this way against Exchange server...

Being able to post new posts to a .Text blog. I currently use w.bloggar, but would be happy with alternatives, especially if it were built in to my favorite reader (and RSS Bandit is getting there).