Aggie vs. FeedDemon

I’ve been talking up the benefits for RSS aggregation, but it’s been a while since I reconsidered my choice of aggregator. I use an old horse called Aggie. It looks like it was thrown together by a grad student, but it’s been working very well for me despite its plain appearance. Last week, someone at work was singing the praises of Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon. It costs $30, as compared to Aggie (free) and another highly rated aggregator, SharpReader (also free). I’ve been trying FeedDemon for the past couple of days, and it is a nice piece of work. Slick-looking, and fast, it only has one problem. It’s built like a newsreader, and I hate newsreaders. Specifically, I dislike having to mark things in great big lists as having been read or not. I only want to see what’s new since the last time I ran the program. FeedDemon lets me do that, but I’m constantly having to select lots of entries and mark them as read. FeedDemon is a well-executed design built on the wrong model. Aggie is three-cylinder amateurish-looking design that is built on exactly the right user model. I haven’t seen anybody else using Aggie’s build-a-single-HTML-page approach, and I don’t know if Aggie has any staying power. I hope they do… or that someone else picks up their model. In the meantime, I’ll save myself $30.