Creating professional RSS feeds is one way to extend the coverage of your website and make it look more professional to your readers.

Feed Editor allows you to create new RSS feeds that look professional but also put you in total control of them at all times. Feed Editor generates feeds using Version 2.0 of the RSS standard and it's based on a WYSIWYG editor so there's no need to have any XML knowledge whatsoever.

Feed Editor can also generate RSS feeds from CSV and HTML files, supports uploading via FTP and works with graphics using templates. With Feed Editor, creating RSS feeds will become a pleasure. In addition, Feed Editor also supports podcasts with an unlimited number of feeds and importing from CSV and HTML feeds.

Feed Editor is a solid RSS feed editor that will give you as much control as you need over your RSS feeds and give your website a much more professional feel.

Download Feed Editor 5.2 in Softonic

FireANT is an RSS video aggregator and media player that helps you keep up to date with the latest internet TV channels and programming.

With the FireANT Player, you can subscribe to any RSS 2.0 channel and automatically download fresh media content to watch and listen to. In this way, you don't need to keep checking your favourite channel - whether it be CNN or ESPN - to see whether there's anything you want to watch on as FireANT delivers it all to you in much the same way as Google Reader tracks your favourite blogs.

The other big draw of FireANT is that the media player is incredibly versatile - rivalling VLC Player in some respects - as it's able to play just about any format without the need for codecs including Quicktime, Windows Media, Flash, Real Media. FireANT can even sync downloaded files with portable media players such as iPod and Sony PSP.

In addition, FireANT player comes with an integrated Yahoo! Video Search function. When FireANT was originally released this was probably quite useful but now that Google is king, you probably won't find much use for it. You can also interact with video creators by sending comments to them based on their content although I'm sceptical as to whether this actually works properly.

A format free and fun way to keep track of your favourite programming, FireANT is maybe a bit dated now but better than having to keep checking channels for new content yourself.

Download FireANT Beta in Softonic

If you're like most people, you have at least a few web sites that you go to on a regular basis. Whether it be BBC World News, Wired or Slashdot, there's a wealth of information out there, constantly changing.

Awasu (TM) is a free Windows news-reader that runs in the background on your computer and monitors these sites for you. When it sees that something new has appeared, it will let you know. Awasu will also keep track of what you have already read which saves you even more time since you no longer need to search through your favorite sites for new stories.

No more surfing the web looking for interesting stuff to read. Instead, Awasu will watch what's happening around the globe and let you know about events almost as soon as they happen. No more trawling through pages full of ads or popups. Now you can get only the stuff you're interested in, delivered to your desktop.

You're not limited to just news services either. You can keep an eye on the current weather in New York, the latest sales data from your London office or which band is playing at your favorite club this weekend. You are limited only by your imagination!

Download Awasu Personal Edition 2.3.3 Alpha 2 in Softonic

Organize, manage and download your RSS and PodCast. Noopod is an ITunes alternative to manage your podcasts. It has many interesting features that you will like:

Manage all your news and podcasts and find it quickly

• PodCast playing in streaming with VLC Media Player, play all podcasts file without QuickTime or another codec
• Noopod use RSS-one Directory to have a lot of RSS and podcast.
• Show your podcast and RSS from your desktop with the Noodock
• Real time notif when you new news is available
• Podcast download manager

Download Noopod 3.0.3 in Softonic

Adobe's Integrated Runtime (AIR) was introduced in early 2008 as a new way for users to access data from the web on their desktops. Apprise is a sample application for AIR, created by one of Adobe's own application developers which works as an RSS feed reader for your desktop.

Those already familiar with AIR applications will know about the sleek, "web 2.0" design they all feature. Apprise is no exception and its attractive, uncluttered interface is easily navigable and intuitively designed. That said, Apprise includes no preferences dialog which probably ends up limiting the functionality of the program more than anything else.

The first operation anyone will want to do with a new feed reader is to start subscribing to feeds: Clicking the 'Add Feed' button displays a layer where you can add a feed's URL. Apprise automatically notices if you have a valid URL in your clipboard and inserts it here for you automatically. We had a couple of problems with this process, with feeds not being recognized properly.

Once your feed is added, the application aggregates all its entries and displays the titles in the main frame of the window. The title of the feed is added to the left-hand pane, where you have a choice of filtering by feed title, author or even category. Apprise also supports the feed format OPML files which means you can add your favorite feeds from another reader or bookmarking site. However, the process of aggregating more than a dozen feeds can be quite long and Apprise doesn't offer much information on its progress.

One of Apprise's main features is the capability to 'preview' feed pages as they appear on their own website. This is, effectively, little more than switching the main pane from feed reader to web-browser and doesn't feel like a very useful feature - especially given that it won't even let you subscribe to feeds in the pages it displays. Similarly disappointing was the search function which always searches all subscribed feeds, without any option to select a particular title to search.

These sorts of minor problems are the main annoyance with Apprise, an application which is essentially a very nice proof-of-concept for Adobe AIR. As a very simple RSS feed reader, Apprise does a good job. But for most users, its lack of options and occasional unreliability make it a poor choice.

Download Apprise 1.5 in Softonic

If you're a news junkie then you're probably constantly looking for new ways to keep up with the news.

FeedLiner deliver news headlines to your desktop in a constant stream. FeedLiner's info line can be switched on permanently or run in the so called "Hunting mode" which monitors the web until you change the presets to search for something else. It's an incredibly effective way to keep tabs on everything that's happening in the world of news, sport and entertainment without having to check RSS bookmarks or websites. If you want to know more about a headline running across FeedLiner, simply place the mouse cursor on it and you will see a brief summary. If you want to see the full text, just click on it and the original Web page will be automatically opened in Bizz Internet Cruiser which is FeedLiner's own internal tabbed browser. While it's not a bad browser, it would be much better if the tabs opened in the browser of your choice - such as IE or Firefox - but it's still readable.

If you always want to on top of the latest headlines and like to see all the news at once then Bizz Feedliner is a powerful product.

Download Bizz FeedLiner 4.11.013 in Softonic

Jitbit RSS Feed Creator is an RSS feed editor, which allows creating, modifying and viewing RSS feeds. It is extremely easy to use and allows professional feed creation with minimal effort. Create new RSS feeds in seconds and keep your visitors informed.

• Creates and maintans RSS feeds
• Requires no knowledge of XML or the RSS data format
• Simple editing and item creation

Download Jitbit RSS Feed Creator 3.47 in Softonic

SofTicker is a free RSS reader which displays feeds in a scrolling bar at the top of your screen. It is not an invasive display mode and you can click on the title which is scrolling in that moment to open a tab or a new web page.

There are fourteen default RSS feeds you can manage and of course you can add your own. The good thing about this reader is that it perfectly integrates into your screen and it doesn't take much space, just a line at the top. The news scrolls very slowly, so it is easy to read, and if you pass the mouse above, you might have a short description according to the web site that originates them. You can even choose the speed of the scrolling and the size of the words, although you can just select between a size 8 and 9. Making the font bold will render the white words more readable as the bar's background is black.

From a usability point of view, I find for example that showing three news sources at a time and changing them at specific intervals would be more effective than scrolling just one news source which you have to follow in order to read. Moreover, having something that moves all the time on the top of your screen can be really annoying after a while.

SofTicker allows you to be always updated with the last news from your favorite website although the display mode chosen is not the most usable one.

Download SofTicker 1.1 in Softonic

Good looking, intuitive, customizable and light-weight, BlogBridge is a hugely impressive newsreader package.

BlogBridge aims to keeps you informed about the state of your subscriptions while sticking to a basic, straightforward system. On the first run, you are given the option to register and pick from a predefined list of blog “guides” or groups. The next step is to enter custom terms that are of particular interest to the user, so that the program can highlight these terms, giving them more prominence. This is a welcome alternative to what seems to be the accepted approach, which consists of bundling of all kinds of feeds of which the majority are of no interest to the user at all.

One of our favourite features was the easy-to-use rating system where users can give feeds a score from one to five stars. The ratings can then be used as a filter to show only the top feeds, making it easy to scan through the most relevant news quickly. What’s more, there are multiple options for customizing the interface, which is by far the best that we’ve seen to date. Other great features come in the form of tags for feeds and a synchronization system for using the reader on multiple computers without the need to sort through the same information more than once.

Extra merit goes with the fact that BlogBridge is an Open Source project, and although it seems secure and stable there are a few minor usability issues that could be improved upon. The program relies on an external browser to display blog sites, letting it concentrate on being a great feed reader. Annoyingly, however it doesn’t detect the default browser. With the browser selected, it then opened everything twice whether it was an article or the programs FAQ page. Even taking these hiccups into consideration, BlogBridge remains a quality package, so if you are searching for an RSS reader, your search has just come to an end.

Download BlogBridge 6.3 in Softonic

ReadAIR is an AIR-based RSS feed reader that you can use instead of Google Reader to review the latest posts in your favorite blogs.

This app works in a very simple way: enter your Gmail address and password, and it'll automatically fetch all your feeds, as well as your shared and starred items. The interface looks like iTunes a lot, which makes the program seem kind of familiar and easy to use.

ReadAIR works generally fine. I especially liked the way feeds are displayed on the program's interface, keeping the original post's layout at all times and using a very visually appealing text font.

However, the program also has some major flaws: to begin with, I couldn't add any new feeds (the "Add" button simply showed a blank window). Also, the only way to move through feeds is by using the mouse, meaning there's no support for keyboard shortcuts.

ReadAIR provides you with another way to access your Google Reader feeds, though it still needs to improve to become a real alternative.

Download ReadAir 0.1 in Softonic

RSSOwl is a free RSS / RDF / Atom Newsreader in Java using SWT as fast graphic library. Supported OS are Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris. Some features are export of news to PDF, Import / Export with OPML and the full text-search with syntax highlight. For easy execution, an EXE is provided on Windows. RSSOwl comes with a huge list of sample favorites.

Download RSSOwl 2.0M8 in Softonic

RSS or Real Simple Syndication, is an ever more popular way to follow the news on Internet. By subscribing to an XML or RSS link, a user can receive all the latest information from multiple sources in one page. Online RSS readers like Google Reader, Bloglines or Rojo are now very popular among users yet you can also use an external RSS reader like Feeddemon to keep up with the flow of information.

Feeddemon is easy to install and although it will ask you for a Newsgator account, you can still launch it even if you don’t have one. The program can import all of your previous subscriptions or it can suggest new feeds to you in all sorts of categories like business, sports or entertainment.

Once launched, the program automatically downloads the latest posts. Feeds are saved in different categories so that you know where to find them. You can also use the search function to find a post containing a particular word. Thanks to the custom news watch, you can get Feeddemon to find news according to certain keywords. This is extremely useful if you’re doing a research paper or investigating a particular topic.

The program window includes a browser window, so you won’t need to open up your internet browser to read your feeds. Feeddemon also supports tabs, allowing you to keep a good deal of posts open for future reading. If you want to save posts, you can flag them, save them as favourites or create a newsbin to store similar articles.

Apart from letting you customize the age limit of new posts and the amount that appears daily, you can use the Clean Up Wizard to get rid of older or unread posts. This is extremely useful as, with so much information being handled, it’s easy to clutter up your newsreader with irrelevant posts.

Feeddemon handles podcasts just like any other RSS feed, however, to play them, either you’ll have to open up the MP3 file in a browser window or download it and play it with the MP3 player of your choice. It would have been more user-friendly if Feeddemon had included an embedded media player to play podcasts.

If you’re on the move, you can still check your feeds stored in Feeddemon online through your Newsgator account. If you don’t have one, take a few seconds to sign up as it’ll also let you use other Newsgator tools like Feedstation.

Apart from this full range of features, the real update in version 2.1 is that Feeddemon has finally integrated the social networking aspect. You can now configure your default blog publisher and send interesting posts to your blog or to delicious and Digg.

We enjoyed using Feeddemon and were excited by all the freedom it gave users in managing their RSS feeds. The profusion of options in the interface can confuse first time users and we’ve suffered occasional lags when updating feeds, yet that’s quite common with any RSS reader. Feeddemon is a top choice external RSS reader which any news junkie will quickly get addicted to. If you’re not so hooked on feeds, it might be too much to handle though.

Download FeedDemon 2.6 in Softonic

Feedreader is a free lightweight aggregator that supports RSS and ATOM formats. Feedreader's functionality is focused on the main task - reading and organizing RSS feeds and offering seamless user experience.

Main Features:

• One-click access for different view modes
• Popular "River Of News" view
• Grouping headlines by source, date or tag
• Possibility to add and remove columns from view
• Powerful filtering and smartfeed engine
• Ultimate configurability, every normal feed can be converted to smartfeed and vice versa
• Possibility to combine multiple feeds to one feed
• Smart feed updates - unique algorithm that learns the update frequency of feeds and triggers the updates only when needed
• Enclosures and podcasting support
• Tagging support
• Nested folder support
• Full Unicode support
• Secure (SSL) connection support

Download Feedreader RC 3.12 in Softonic

YeahReader is a free program for reading news feeds in RSS, RDF and Atom formats, and podcasts.

The program provides all basic RSS reader functionality such as a convenient feed update system, proxy support and pop-up update notification. Besides this, YeahReader has such features as built-in blog client that will allow you to quickly write messages to your LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress or Delicious blog, OPML support, ability to export data into HTML, CSV or JS format, multilanguage support and others.

Although quite functional, YeahReader is one of the easiest news readers to use. The program contains a collection of links to popular RSS feeds on various subjects so you will not waste time searching for interesting links.

Download YeahReader 2.3 in Softonic

Features include the ability to view news items in customizable newspaper views, the ability to synchronize the read and unread state of the application across multiple computers, and the ability to expire items so that they get deleted after a certain amount of days.

Other highlights include pinpoint control of how often items are downloaded, support for password protected feeds, and reduced bandwidth consumption by using HTTP conditional GETs and GZIP encoding, search folders. You can view comments directly in the reader without going to the site, postcomments from the reader, plus take advantage of the integrated Web search, tabbed browsing, and security settings for disabling unsafe browser features like ActiveX.

Download RSS Bandit 1.0.6.2 in Softonic

Mindity is an innovative RSS reader that enables you not only to access your favorite feeds, but also share them with an active user community.

In fact, Mindity looks like an IM application rather than a RSS client, with quite a long interface and an associated program icon on the System Tray. It even displays small warning windows on the bottom right corner every time there are new posts published on the RSS feeds you're subscribed to.

The good thing about Mindity is that you can easily import all of your subscriptions by loading the OPML file of your current RSS client (in Google Reader, for example, this option is located under Settings > Import/Export). I'm glad this importing tool worked seamlessly, especially since I wasn't able to find any other RSS feeds in the program's embedded search engine. Feeds are then listed on the program interface, displaying only the first few lines of each entry. If you want to read the whole item, just click on it and it'll open on a separate window.

Despite its focus on the social side, Mindity wasn't very successful in that aspect either. The only way to find new friends is by knowing their nickname, with no possibility to search for them by language, location or areas of interest, to name a few possibilities.

Mindity intends to be an RSS tool based on a social community, but the lack of users and an inefficient search engine makes it just a standard feed reader.

Download Mindity 0.9.0.2 in Softonic

Feed Mix is an RSS editor designed to be as powerful enough for RSS gurus yet refreshingly easy for first timers. The program lets you create, edit and publish an unlimited number of RSS feeds and podcasts. Unique to Feed Mix is its ability to create a new RSS feed or a podcast from several existing feeds.

The program offers a host of useful tools, including a WYSIWYG feed editor, a built-in RSS reader, a blog client, an HTML editor, an image editor, an XML editor and an FTP upload facility. All these and other tools are delivered in an intuitively transparent user interface that makes RSS creation and maintenance surprisingly simple, even for a rookie.

Creating a new RSS feed from several others is a breeze and doesn't require any advanced knowledge. Simply specify which news from the selected RSS feeds you would like to see in your new RSS feed, and all the mixing job is done by Feed Mix. Click on the "New Project" button to create a new RSS feed, select the source RSS feeds and add them to Feed Mix.

Every new feed is loaded automatically and its content is displayed in the view area. You can then add the feed information such as topics, or an image to the project. Also, you can modify the layout of the Project feed if this is necessary. Once you have the feed, you can upload it to the website using the built-in FTP upload and publishing facility.

Download Feed Mix 4.9 in Softonic

RSS Xpress is a program read RSS feeds versions 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0.1 and atoms. The application includes the essential functionalities for using RSS feeds and even more:

• A very easy and complete interface
• Possibility to organise your feeds in folders
• New messages are saved locally so that you can browse them offline
• You are informed about new messages by a popup window and a sound
• Possibility to import and export feeds in the OPML format
• A search engine to find easily old messages in your feeds
• An auto-update
• Tab-browsing
• Possibility to customize the application
• Compatible with feeds protected with a username and password
• Supports proxies (protected with a username and password)

Download RSS Xpress 2.7.45 in Softonic

MakaGiga was originally created as an RSS reader but this open source has grown so much that it now includes a whole lot more. The latest version includes everything from a tasks manager, notebook, photo viewer and photo editor to search engine tools, backup tool and widget creator.

However, in the early days it was simply an RSS reader and that's what it still performs best. The reader is very easy to use mainly thanks to the intuitive and well organised interface. Just add the RSS feeds to the favorites folder and the program does the rest including previews of posts and pictures in blog posts. The photo viewer is not particularly sophisticated and the backup function is very limited. However, the widget creator is an interesting innovation although I found it crashed when trying to save them on more than one occasion.

As far as RSS readers go, this program should have stuck to that because it does it well although you can take or leave the other little goodies.

Download MakaGiga 1.9.2 Beta in Softonic

GreatNews displays full pages of news articles across RSS feeds, optimized for fast reading. So you can skim through pages in seconds, and pick interesting ones to dig in.

Automatic news highlighting makes important news stand out. Fully customizable with keywords, channel selections, and foreground/ background colors.

GreatNews stores all your favorite articles locally, so you won't lose any article when the web site is down or updated. You can also assign labels to articles so that you can retrieve them later by a single click.

Download GreatNews 1.0.383 Beta in Softonic