Software Update: RSS Bandit 1.3.0.38

RSS Bandit is a program that collects RSS and Atom feeds from, for example, websites, forums and weblogs. These are then refreshed on a regular basis so that you stay informed of the latest events. Anyone who is curious about the appearance of RSS Bandit can go on this page view a list of screenshots and descriptions. Version 1.3.0.38 has recently been released with the following changes:

New Features:

• NNTP Newsgroups support: Users can specify a public NNTP server such as news.microsoft.com and subscribe to newsgroups on that server. Users can also respond to newsgroup posts as well as create new posts. Permalinks in a newsgroup post point to the post on Google Groups.
• Item Manipulation from Newspaper Views: Items can be marked as read or unread and flagged or unflagged directly from the newspaper view. This improves end user work flow as one no longer has to leave the newspaper view and right-click on the list view to either flag or mark a post as unread.
• Subscription Wizard: The process for subscribing to newsgroups, search results and web feeds has been greatly simplified. For example, users no longer need to know the web feed of a particular web site to subscribe to it but can instead specify the web page URL and discovery of its web feed is done automatically.
• Synchronization with Newsgator Online: Users can synchronize the state of their subscribed feeds (read/unread posts, new/deleted feeds, etc) between RSS Bandit and their account on Newsgator Online. This allows the best of both worlds where one can use both a rich desktop client (RSS Bandit) and a web-based RSS reader (Newsgator Online) without having to worry about marking things as read in both places.
• Using back and forward arrows to view last post seen in reading pane: When navigating various feeds in the RSS Bandit tree view it is very useful to be able to go back to the last feed or item viewed especially when using the [spacebar] button to read unread items. RSS Bandit now provides a way to navigate back and forth between items read in the reading pane using the back and forward buttons in the toolbar.
• Atom 1.0 support: The Atom 1.0 syndication format is now supported.
• Threaded Posts Now Optional: The feature where items that link to each other are shown as connected items reminiscent of threaded discussions can now be disabled and is off by default. This feature is very processor intensive and can slow down the average computer to the point that is unusable if one is subscribed to a large number of feeds.
• Launching Browsers in the Background: A new Web browser can now be opened from a newspaper view without it stealing the focus of the application by holding down Ctrl when clicking a link in the reading pane.
• UI Improvements: Icons in the tree view have been improved to make them more distinctive and also visually separate newsgroups from web feeds.

Bug Fixes:

• Scroll wheel manipulates the main window instead of the drop down list on a dialog box when the dialog box has focus.
• Setting the default refresh rate to 0 (zero) did not disable automatic refresh of all feeds
• No results displayed when subscribed to URLs with escaped characters such as http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=C%23&btnG=Search+Blogs&num=100&output=rss
• ThreadAbortException error sometimes occurs when multiple feeds clicked on in rapid succession
• Mark all as read in a search folder does not update the treeview state of the subscriptions
• Refresh button for web browser refresh does not work
• Tree view font issue. Font height may rendered way too small on high-res screen resolutions or with custom font definitions that use big fonts.
• Keyboard shortcut for “Mark All Items As Read” changed to Ctrl+Q from Ctrl+M
• Deleting a feed changes the selected tree node to the “My Feeds” node instead of the next node in the tree.
• Proxy bypass server list damaged after reload of the Options dialog if more than one bypass address/server was specified.
• pushing [spacebar] or “Next Unread Item” when positioned in comments goes to newest unread instead of oldest unread comment.
• The links in the Options dialog didn’t work
• Ctrl-Enter does not expand the URLs as expected
• When uploading a feed list, the dialog box that appears on successful upload has been removed since it is redundant.
• The “Email This” menu option didn’t work correctly
• Crash caused if an item has already been added: “AppUserDataPath”
• Tab controls on the Options dialog are rendered incorrectly on wide screen displays (16:9 aspect ratio)
• Category settings don’t stick for nested categories
• Crash occurs after setting properties for a category if some feeds are not in a category
• Toolbar state and window maximized states are not saved if application was closed via system tray icon context menu
• Modifying the feedlist while loading feeds from disk or refreshing from the Web by subscribing to a new feed or deletion stops the feeds loading/downloading progress.
• On failed authentication with credentials, we don’t ignore cookies and retry one more time before giving up and reporting the failure
• Some HTML entities are not decoded correctly in UI widgets
• NullReferenceException error on “Update category” command
• Access requests to comment feeds on a password-protected feed do not use the credentials used to access the main feed
• Search criteria on search folders not reloaded correctly on restart