I just got a comment to my previous blog post which pointed out that it's been a long time since the last release of RSS Bandit and asked whether development has stopped. Torsten and I are still hard at work on the project but development has been slow because this is a side project for both of us which we only get to work on when we have free time. Anyway here's a general status update for the next release which is currently codenamed Jubilee.

Completed Features

• Comment Watching
• Date-based grouping in the list view
• Options for opening tabs in the background
• Favicons

Features in progress

• Podcasting support - Think of it as adding the most useful features of Doppler Radio or Juice Receiver to RSS Bandit.
• Revamping the search feature - We're moving the implementation of feed search to Lucene.Net from our custom feed search implementation which should make it faster and provide richer search options
• Remembering application state on restart - This will work similar to the Session Saver extension in Firefox in that open tabs and the tree view state will be remembered on restart

Major problems to fix

• Application doesn't work in Vista - the fact that Visual Studio.NET 2003 doesn't work on Vista makes it doubly difficult for me to figure out how to resolve the issues. I believe many of the issues are related to our use of Divelement controls which may go away once we switch to Infragistics controls
• Feed items appear in wrong feed folders - This problem has been particularly difficult to track down over the past few months. It happens to me about once every few months but I can never isolate the reason why. :(
• Synchronization with NewsGator Online doesn't synchronize read/unread state - I always thought this was due to bugs in the NewsGator API but never could prove this conclusively. I'll be giving this code a good once over to see if I can root out the problems
• Resolving Relative Links in Atom 1.0 feeds - until I fix this problem links in Tim Bray and Sam Ruby's feeds won't work correctly

Postponed features

• Personalized meme tracking/hot topics - our plate is currently too full to shove such a complex new feature into the mix

As far as dates go, the only thing I will commit to is that we will have a release this year. I expect that we will be ready to provide a beta release by the end of October or early November at the latest with a final release in time for the holiday season.