Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

Well, the teams are exhausted :-), but this is a HUGE multi-product release day!

First, FeedDemon 2.0.  It’s been a long time in coming, but now it’s done.  It of course includes FeedStation 2.0…but FeedStation is also available as a separate download if you want to grab it separately to use just with NewsGator Online or NewsGator Inbox.  A huge thanks and congrats to Nick Bradbury, who I think has been on a caffiene high for quite a while getting this release ready.

Next, NewsGator Inbox 2.6.  As I mentioned earlier, we changed the name of NewsGator Outlook edition to NewsGator Inbox…and added a ton of new features that folks have been asking for.  More thanks and congrats here go to Nick Harris (who still doesn’t have a blog, but now that I’ve mentioned it twice maybe he will!), who I think worked himself right into the ground preparing this release with his team.

NewsGator Online now has a whole new look.  It adds a number of small features, like favicons and such…but the real news here is it has set us up to quickly add a ton of new features and capabilities that are on the backlog.  And the purchase process for new products is finally as easy as can be, integrating multiple products and subscriptions in a way that makes sense, and old subscription plans have been consolidated into the new catalog of options.  A huge thanks and congrats here to the online team – Tim, Demi, Noel, Dede, Brian, and James…and to the platform guys – Darryl, Glenn, Jeff, Gordon, Chris, and Rob.

And finally, as of these releases we’ve made good on our promise to abolish the subscription model as you used to know it.  Now, you can buy FeedDemon or NewsGator Inbox (and soon NetNewsWire) for $29.95, and you’ll get a free year subscription which includes value-added services such as synchronization (and lots more to come).  At the end of that year, you can choose to renew your subscription if you wish for $19.95.  But if you choose not to renew, your software will continue to work forever – just without the online-specific features.

So all in all, a busy day…let us know what you think!

Quite a day today…the product that started NewsGator, NewsGator Outlook edition, has a new name!  It’s now called NewsGator Inbox, and v2.6 release candidate 1 is available now.  This product has sure come a long way since the first prototype, and the 1.0 release, over 3 years ago.  Congrats to Nick Harris, the lead developer on NewsGator Inbox, who doesn’t have a blog I can link to (but maybe this will shame him into it! :-)

There’s a LOT of new features, including clippings sync (the first NewsGator product to do this), greatly enhanced podcasting support, improved synchronization with the NewsGator platform, and too much more to mention.  And of course, the synchronization in NewsGator Inbox works similarly to our other products – not only feed sync, but sync of individual items and read-states, and dramatic performance gains over “traditional” aggregators.

So take a look – details are in the forum post here!

You know it’s a busy day when we have a mobile announcement as cool as this and I’m the last to blog about it. :-)

So here’s the deal. NewsGator is into mobile in a big way, and we’ve had a mobile HTML reader for quite some time (hint – if you’re an existing subscriber, go here to find the mobile configuration area). But it’s time for much more than this.

Today, we announced a couple of things. First, we acquired SmartFeed and SmartRead for Windows Mobile, and hired Kevin Cawley (their creator) in the process. You can download the free previews of the applications right now; we’re working on a number of changes right now, including making them dramatically faster, and we expect to have a public beta available in the next month or so.

At the same time, we also announced our J2ME reader, for java-enabled devices.  This should be available in beta right around the same time, and will provide a similar experience to the windows mobile reader.

But why?

Well, here’s the thing.  We’ve always been about “any time, any place, any device.”  We’ve had a great story about it up to now, with rich applications for the web, Outlook, Windows, the Mac, Windows Media Center, and a lighter experience for HTML-capable mobile devices.  All of these applications sync together (FeedDemon and NetNewsWire in their current betas), and it’s really a great experience.

But on mobile devices, we found the experience wanting.  Using the HTML mobile app ourselves, and watching others use it, it’s very handy – but not as streamlined as it could be.  And there are certain missing functions – saving items to clippings, etc.  Some of these features are being added, but some are difficult to implement effectively in the confines of a mobile browser.

Enter the rich mobile clients.  These clients provide a great experience, tailored for the device you’re using.  Download items, save them, even browse for new feeds; they really take the mobile content experience to the next level.  And they can provide better responsiveness, even on low bandwidth connections like GPRS.

But there are already mobile clients out there; why NewsGator?

Well here’s the thing.  And I’m sure I’ll get some raised eyebrows for this, and at least one hate mail…but in my opinion, a mobile RSS aggregator is useless if it’s not synchronized with the rest of your life.

Useless?  Yep.  Other than the first week after we buy a new phone or PDA, when we play with absolutely everything, most of us use mobile devices as an extension of our everyday lives.  It’s not the only device we use – it’s a companion device that we use when we’re not sitting at our desk, or with our laptop on.  And it’s certainly not the only place we want to consume content.

When these mobile applications are synchronized with NewsGator Online and the rest of the suite of products, though, they become much more powerful.  Now it’s synchronized with your primary content application (be it NG/Online, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Outlook, or whatever other application you use), and you can use it as a companion device.  It’s amazingly efficient.

If you’re going to MIX, be sure to come to the RSS talk, where you’ll see current (and private) builds of both the NewsGator windows mobile application, and the new version of NetNewsWire!  And _much_ more – I’ll write some more about this next week.

And in the meantime…make sure your mobile data plan is active, and watch for NewsGator’s mobile beta launches.  And a big “welcome” to Kevin Cawley!