I got to be an early alpha tester on Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon 2.0 update. Nick has now made it available for wider testing via his blog (and previously the NewsGator support forum, though it wasn’t bloggable then) and it’s worth checking out.

The key things that I really dig about this update are:

• A hierarchical treeview for subscriptions. I find this much easier to navigate than the “one group/folder at a time” approach of earlier versions. It’s also easier to manage subscriptions in different groups.
• The “attention” stuff that lets you see what you’re spending the most time reading. I have far too many feeds in FeedDemon currently and it’s rare that I can keep up with all of them on a regular basis. Using some of these tools, it’ll be much easier to trim down my subscriptions to a manageable level. The reporting tools from the 1.6 beta (especially the dinosaur report) is good for this also, but there’s a distinction between “feed that updates infrequently” and “feed that has high value for me”. Some blogs update very infrequently, but when the do I want to pay attention to them.

Anyway, with the cat out of the bag, go forth and give it a shot. Nick has always been very receptive to feedback, so now’s the time to put it through its paces and report what you find. I’m still using 1.5 on my “main” machine, but I’m finding that the machine that’s been running the various 2.0 alpha builds has been getting more and more use.