Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon and Topstyle, will now be working for Newsgator. He explains the move in this post on his blog.
Nick explains that the idea behind this move was born out of his support forums. Basically, his customers wanted the ability to use the desktop aggregator, FeedDemon, on multiple machines. Nick’s license permits (and encourages) this, and many users have the aggregator installed on an office machine, a home machine, and perhaps a laptop. Nick writes:
As regular visitors to my support forums know, the biggest request – by far – that FeedDemon customers have had is the ability to synchronize their subscriptions between multiple computers. They use FeedDemon on one PC at home, on another at the office, on a laptop while traveling, etc., and they want their feeds to be synched between them.
If someone reads an item on one computer, it shouldn’t show up as unread on another computer. And when they subscribe to a feed, it should automatically appear on any computer they use. Basically, provide the convenience of a web-based aggregator with the power and speed of a Windows desktop application.
I toyed with various hack-ish ways to do this, and even considered creating my own web-based sync service, but in the end came to the conclusion that to really do this right, I needed to join forces with someone who already had the server-side piece in place.
This has been one of my biggest complaints with using the desktop aggregator, but I just dealt with it, simply because I like the speed and customization that FeedDemon provides. From the sound of Nick’s enthusiasm, it appears that this will be a great deal for him and his customers. With the acqusition, current FeedDemon users (like me) are going to come out pretty good:
NewsGator uses a subscription model, and FeedDemon will become part of their subscription plans. All existing FeedDemon customers will get a two-year business standard subscription for free – and this includes upgrades to FeedDemon. In other words, if you’ve already bought FeedDemon, you’ll get brand new versions of FeedDemon and a subscription to NewsGator Online free for the next two years.
Nick is currently working on a 1.5.1 beta, and I’ll try it out as soon as it is available. As you can imagine, there are plenty of folks upset with the move, and many have voiced their concern in the comments on his blog. I am not going to weigh in just yet, as I would like to wait and see how things develp. In the meantime, good luck to Nick on “entering this new chapter” in his life and the life of FeedDemon.