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NOTE: This post involves all NG products so I'm posting it in NGOS general - mods, if there's a different forum you'd like to put, feel free to move it.
Well, I've been using the various new products for a while now, and have seen some of the same problems and questions pop up over and over on both the NG and the FD forums, and after a long bit of thought, have written down what I see as issues/problems NG is facing right now. I want to preface this by saying that I love the NG and FD products - I use them for my RSS aggregation exclusively, even in a new/beta state. However, I have the deep-down feeling that NG/FD are teetering on the edge of something even better, like Tiger Wood's shot on 16 in the 2005 Masters, holding on to the lip of the cup. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that if all the bugs can be worked out soon, the FD/NG combo can really become "the killer app" of the Syndication industry. This is my personal opinion - this thread is about making NG/FD better, not for application wars, so please find somewhere else to post if you want to debate that.
One of the biggest things that has become apparent since NG Outlook 2.5 (NGOlk) and FD 1.6b1 were released is a general confusion among the users about exactly how "synchronization" between the various Newsgator products is intended by the NG/FD develops to work - a white paper, or even a few diagrams would do wonders for this. As was noted by another poster, this confusion about exactly WHAT we're seeing makes it hard for us that are testing/beta testing the products to determine if behavior we have observed is actually a bug or not.
There are currently 3 components to NG - NGOS, NGOlk, and FD (yes, there is FeedStation, but that is download facilitator rather than synchronized aggregation). I think what I expect (and what I suspect most people expect) is that any changes (news item marked as read, folder order changed, feed renamed, feed deleted,etc) made in any of the 3 components are reflected to the other 2 during their next synch. However two (IMHO MAJOR) limitations on two of the products (renaming feeds in NGOS and lack of tree structure in FD) really prevent this from happening as I would like/expect, and I think the absence of those features is causing at least part of the problems we're seeing.
In all honesty, I really don't think any more should have been added in the FD 1.x feature set as far as synchronization and integration with the other NG products unless the "tree view" of feeds was added as well. This is the most crucial limitation that prevents seamless syncing between the products - when two of the products can handle complex folder structures, but one can't, there are bound to be issues, issues I don't think can be really overcome until a true tree view is implemented. And Nick, don't take that as a knock - I think you know I'm one of the biggest FD supporters around  . It just seems to an outsider that there wasn't much thought given to possible repercussions of synchronizing among 3 completely different products (there may have been, and probably were, months of meetings and talks about it, I'm just saying that the perception is out there that there wasn't a lot of long-range thought given to it). I really feel (although I could be completely wrong!) that a lot of the sync issues that we've seen were due to having to program around FD's structure limitations.
I think the "Locations" feature is a brilliant idea, but there should be a way in all 3 products to define at the time of subscription(and edited later in feed properties)what location(s) a feed should be assigned to. For instance, I could be browsing in FD, which is set to my "personal" location and run across a feed that I think would be good for work. When the feed sub wizard comes up, I should be able to say that this should be assigned to the All, Mobile, Work, and NGOS locations.
I've got some other thoughts and ideas, but they're hard for me to get across in written word - I'm a talker/whiteboard scribbler kinda guy, but I think I've provided enough to chew on for right now.
Again: This thread is NOT for bashing NG/FD or any other aggregator - please take grudges somewhere else; it's not for specific bug reporting/feature requesting of a specific product - there are threads for that.
critter42
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Note: I am not employed by NewsGator Technologies in any capacity
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NewsGator
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Thanks for taking the time to post this - and sorry for taking so long to reply!
Although there was quite a bit of discussion about how to handle synching in our varied products, you're right that differences in the products have made the sync process more confusing than it ought to be. Although FeedDemon 1.6 uses an internal tree structure for your subscriptions, the UI is still one-folder-at-a-time, which as you point out is a source of much of the trouble. I'd love to say I'm adding a tree UI in 1.6, but I'm afraid it isn't planned until the next major version.
Truth is, I look at this progressing much the same way that MS Office progressed. The first versions of MS Office were loosely integrated because each product was developed independently, but in the course of a few releases the products worked much better together. I think this is the case for FeedDemon more so than NG Outlook Edition, since FeedDemon was created by myself long before it was acquired by NewsGator. Radically changing FeedDemon in a single release just isn't possible (nor would it be accepted by many existing customers), but subsequent releases will certainly improve the synching and make it more seamless than it is now.
I should add, too, that there remain a number of synch-related improvements and fixes that will make it into FeedDemon 1.6 - we're still in beta, so it's not set in stone yet.
Thanks again,
Nick Bradbury
NewsGator, Inc.|Nick's Blog
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NewsGator
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Last Login: 11/7/2008 1:37:27 PM
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I would just add one thing to Nick's comments...and that is we also intent for sync to work how you describe. Changes you make in any one application are reflected in each of the other applications you're using. And it's close now - not perfect, and you bring up a few instances where it's not - but close. The back-end system supports everything we need to do this...so it's just a matter of getting the client applications (including the web site) to support all of the necessary features. That said, not all applications are likely to support every feature. So for example, there are organizational things we could do in FeedDemon or in the Web Edition that just aren't possible in Outlook. And vice-versa. So I think where we want to get to is an optimized user experience on each device/application, that takes advantage of all of the capabilities of that device...all while maintaining cross-application state through the sync system.
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