[Exclusive] FeedMe: An intuitive RSS Reader

Posted on March 27th, 2009 by Abhishek Baxi

Redirected from http://feedme.winmo.in

When Joe Chiu shared this brilliant app with me (amongst other Microsoft folks), I thought we need to share this with other WinMo enthusiasts and users. So, after several mails to-and-fro between us, and amazing support from Joe, I’m glad to announce the public release of FeedMe.

FeedMe is a lightweight and neat RSS/podcast/photostream client for Windows Mobile devices, both Professional (PocketPCs) and Standard (Smartphones).

FeedMe is not just a regular content subscription app, but also helps you to discover interesting content that you may not be aware of. FeedMe enables you to find interesting feeds on the Web and subscribe to them by using the Discover Feed option when reading an item allowing you to add feeds from external Websites and by using the Search feature. You can also subscribe to keywords.

Another brilliant feature of FeedMe is the ability to subscribe to Flickr and Zooomr photostreams and view them as a slide show.

Subscrbing to a photostream though is similar to a blog/podcast. You need to manually add the photostream URL as a feed, and voila!

An exhaustive feature list of FeedMe:

Supports RSS, RDF, and Atom feed formats
View feed content in full HTML fidelity with pictures
Supports MP3/WMA podcasts (Also supports streaming WMA)
Download Manager: Allows you to view the progress of current downloading podcasts
Downloaded Podcast channel allows you to view all your downloaded podcasts easily
Today folder, Watch folder (find content with certain keywords)
Cache all the content for seamless reading experience
Play all downloaded podcasts in a playlist in Downloaded Podcast channel
Pick a feed from an OPML file (You can open the OPML file from local device or from a URL)
Options to automatically download latest episodes of a podcast and purge old files
Config file auto-save and auto-recovering

Download the application from here or snap the tag below for a direct download link. Please make sure you have the .NET Compact Frameworks 3.5 installed on your WinMo, or you might experience crashes and screen flickering.

Like it? Hate it? Feedback? Let us know in the comments. Please also share the word, and spread the buzz.

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Tags: FeedMe, photos, podcasts, RSS

24 Responses → “[Exclusive] FeedMe: An intuitive RSS Reader”

MobileSpoon

1 year ago

Looks great!
Check out some additional RSS readers for Windows Mobile in here:

http://mobilespoon.blogspot.com/search/label/RSS%20Readers
foaf

1 year ago

When adding a new feed I can’t seem to paste into the box that has by default “http://….”. Quite annoying, unless I’m doing something wrong.
Alex

1 year ago

Like it! Its lightweight, no-nonsense interface does a great job. Believe me: RSS readers for WinMo Smartphone: I’ve tried them all, and FeedMe is about to become my favorite.

One detail: unless I’m doing something wrong, it doesn’t seem to be downloading the IMAGES of the articles until I read them. Most of the time, I read while offline. And the “Slideshow” option appears disabled all the time, even on a Flickr feed.

Can I write something on the wishlist? Add an option for “full screen” view while reading the articles. It’s quite confortable.

To give you an idea, my current feed reader is mDigger (mdigger.net). Its interface is more polished (but also slower) and it does the image caching, but I don’t like to depend on their site, specially since I can only add 15 RSS feeds. I prefer to import my feeds from my Google Reader account. If you add the image caching, I could switch to FeedMe at once.

Thanks for the great app.
Joe Chiu

1 year ago

foaf and Alex,
Appreciate both of your feedback.

I think I can address the double http:// issue easily by detecting the “http://http://” and just replace them with a single “http://”.

For the image caching, I will experiment with this feature, and if I could get it to work well, I would make it an option. I personally prefer to only download images for posts I read to save CPU and networking, but I recognize that this is important for quality offline reading experience.

Once I have the update, I will ask Abhishek to update the binaries!
Alex

1 year ago

Joe:

I’ll be looking forward to the image caching option. Thanks!
ICTag

1 year ago

a) feedme is truly brilliant.
b) is there a forum. I'm having flickering problems which might be because I'm using .Net 2.0. 3.5 won't install on my windows mobile 5.0.
baxiabhishek

1 year ago

I'm afraid, there's not a resolution I can suggest.

Running FeedMe on .NET Compact Framework 2.0 gives several issues, screen flickering in your case. Maybe Joe would want to write a v2.0 application
ICTag

1 year ago

Thanks. Then I'll try and work out how to install .Net 3.5. This is MS Windows Mobile issue and nothing to do with readme.
ICTag

1 year ago

2 weeks on…
I still haven't managed to get a podcast to work. The suggested npr streams stall in status “0% downloaded”. Some other streams do download but then I get the message unrecognized format from windows media player (download is of type *.mp).
But the text and photos mode works perfectly.
mp

1 year ago

Sweet. Must have tried a dozen or so, this one will stay, simple and brilliant.
Michael Malver

1 year ago

Hello,
I am blind, so when I interact with my pocket pc, I do it using the built-in keyboard, or keys on the device. The program called “mobile speak” located at http://www.codefactory.es gives me voice output on what is on the screen for whatever application I am running.
The problem I am having with feedme is that when I use the “discover feeds” option within an article, I can arrow through the list of discovered feeds, but I can not use the enter key to check the checkbox I have selected.
Could you please fix this? The way things are now, I can only add a feed by manually entering it into the program.
I have only played with the software for a couple hours, but accept for the above-mentioned problem, the rest of the app is accessible to me as a blind person. Thanks for creating an accessible, easy-to-use program.
Abhishek Baxi

1 year ago

Thanks ICTag and Michael for sharing the feedback.

I’m sure we can hope to see improvements in upcoming version.
Diana

12 months ago

Mobile translators are the newest mania here. Everyone are downloading them to help the read news and stuff with a mobile. Interlecta’s mobile translator is what I downloaded last but they don’t have a translator for win mobile, only for BlackBerry fans
Steve

11 months ago

I like. It would really help if I could paste the URLs for the feeds into it though.
mort

10 months ago

Thanks for this nice tool, one of the better free ones I tried so far

But I would really enjoy to see some of the following wishes in the next versions:

- being able to cancel an started update
- possibility to deactivate the loading of images
- possibility to sort my feeds by “moving up / “moving down” in the list
- maybe placing the “update”-button somewhere else and not at the same place as the “back”-button
- having the actual number and total amount of feeds listed while reading a feed (e.g.: “3/20 6 unread”)
- in general I always enjoy having much influence on settings

Thanks I you consider those ideas as being worth to implement
mort

10 months ago

I forgot to mention the missing support for “Umlaute” in german and similiar languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut
mort

10 months ago

Once again me
(I still hope someone is reading that and taking it into account within further development)

Opening a detailed feednews can end up in having the curser already on the link to open it in a browser, and in a way it automatically does that. Without clicking on the link, it anyways seems to think i did, which is leading to my next wish:

I would like to be asked if it should be opened in a browser and I would for sure want to decide which browser to use for that.

PS: The tool still has a living developer?
Abhishek Baxi

10 months ago

Hi Mort, and others.
The comments are read, and acknowledged as well. However, the active development on the app is not on indvidual fixes, but a complete refresh, which ofcourse would take care of the feedback.

Stay put
Joe Chiu

9 months ago

Hi All, Joe here (the author of FeedMe):

Answering a few questions and comment:

Alex and others, I have handed a new version to Abhishek with the download images feature and bug fixes (toggle it in in Options dialog). It should be up soon. But I have to say, you really need to know what you wish for It could take a very long time to download all those images that come with the feed. It works with most feeds I tested with, but unfortunately not 100%.

NPR podcast issues: It looks like the NPR’s OPML file has grown too big for FeedMe to handle on device. You might need to figure out the URL and subscribe to individual podcast manually. Or you can use the “Feed Search” feature to find the podcast feed of your favorite program.

mort: Some of the UI suggestions you mentioned are good ideas, but I want to keep the program simple. About opening the link in a browser, on SK2 Menu, there is an option to “Open in Browser”. That feature uses ShellExecute to open the URL in system default browser. That is the best I could do without having to hardcode path to various 3rd party browsers like Opera. Although I do notice that 3rd party browser like Opera doesn’t seem to take over the ShellExecute of URL from Internet Explorer Mobile. Sorry, not sure what else I could do there. You might be able to tweak registry to change the URL handler to a different 3rd party browser.

I haven’t been spending a lot of time on developing FeedMe recently. But if there are good ideas, I would revisit this project from time to time.

Thanks,
Joe