Free Software

If you’ve been following this site for awhile, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of the Thunderbird project.   The software is free and very comparable to Microsoft Outlook.  Ever since I first heard about Thunderbird 3.0, it instantly got my attention with the tabbed e-mails feature they were working on.   Truthfully, over the past year I’d kind of forgotten about it because all Thunderbird news seemed to be bad news.

That all changed today when I began reading a post over at Ars Technica that Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 is due sometime in April.   While it looks like the calendar integration (Lightning) will not be included with this release, there should be some good stuff in store for us.

Anyone else looking forward to this release?

If you’ve been blogging for awhile, you’ll probably remember Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere” they would release quarterly which looked at blogging as a whole and talked about trends and whatever else was relevant in Technorati’s eyes.

Another industry that has been thriving lately is the open source community.   With the popularity of free software such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Linux, OpenOffice and the GIMP, it is no surprise that open source is doing quite well and quickly becoming mainstream.

In order to see how far open source has come and to look towards what the next decade holds, Bruce Perens has posted a great read titled The State of Open Source.  If you follow the open source movement at all, I recommend you check it out!

I’m a big fan of both Google Reader and Bloglines, but I’ve made no secret of the fact that I feel GreatNews does the best job of filling my feed reading needs. I don’t need a web-based feed reader really and I like the extra features that GreatNews offers.

One thing I always wanted to try was the NewsGator desktop feed reader FeedDemon. It comes highly recommended from several people whose opinions I have a great respect for, but it has always had a cost associated with it. I’m certainly not opposed to forking over some cash for a product that will fill a need of mine (such as SnagIt), but it was a need that GreatNews was filling for free.

Today I noticed that anyone can now download NewsGator products for free, including their desktop feed reader, Feed Demon. I was of course thrilled to see this news so that I could give it a try. It only took about 5 minutes to export and then import my feeds between the two readers and I was up and running. So far things are great, but I want to give it a few days going through my routine before I decide if I’m going to stick with them. I also want to check out how it syncs up with its online counterpart, NewsGator online.

Have you tried Feed Demon yet? I’m mostly interested in getting the opinions of those that use desktop feed readers, but I’d like to hear from anyone that has tried Feed Demon before.