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I personally used FeedDemon for the better part of a decade, which had an option to synchronize with google reader. Unfortunately the author is also ending development of the software with the Google news being the last straw, effective today.

Yeah, this is something I don't understand about this change. How the reliance on mshtml.dll for IE integration for many apps out there will work (or if they simply won't). It should be easy enough to test though; just install e.g. TopStyle and check its IE preview. :-)

Nick Bradbury, the original author of HomeSite has a product that I believe is a better editor than HomeSite. It is often confused as "just a stellar CSS editor" but it does so much more. It is called TopStyle http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/index.asp/

FeedDemon - yeah, to get your $25 worth it helps to OPML and how to transform XML, but that's what I like about it.

Straw - for when I'm in the Gnome .

BlogLines - web-native but with an API to die for.

AmphetaDesk - around for a while, great if you like shooting your foot of in Perl.

NewsGator - for Outlook - still, you can tweak it to feed event-extended RSS into your task calendar.

rss2Email - for when my Knoppix install has nothing better to do.

SharpReader - not as good as FeedDemon, but less expensive. There are a few others, the WikiPedia has a good handle on that - point is, how is the IBM tool different than all of the above? Are they not going to use RSS or ATOM feeds?

FeedDemon is a lot nicer in my opinion. This doesn't even look as clean as GMail.

The best tool for editing CSS (and the HTML/XHTML that goes with it) is TopStyle Pro, from Nick Bradbury, the original creator of the HomeSite editor. Unfortunately, TopStyle is for Windows only. (Nick codes in Delphi.)

I think there's one out there that does what you want, but it costs a little money.

I remember finding a plugin for TopStyle (a shareware app) to HTML-Kit (at one point my favorite, free web editor), so naturally I went to investigate.
Looks pretty nifty, though I never paid to get it, and there wasn't a free trial when I first looked at it.

See
http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/ and specifically
http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/tour/stylecheck.a sp

I think there's one out there that does what you want, but it costs a little money.

I remember finding a plugin for TopStyle (a shareware app) to HTML-Kit (at one point my favorite, free web editor), so naturally I went to investigate.
Looks pretty nifty, though I never paid to get it, and there wasn't a free trial when I first looked at it.

See
http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/ and specifically
http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/tour/stylecheck.a sp

If you look at my other posts you'll see that I don't think too favourably about small software companies.

I can name several small software companies that make great software, and will likely be purchased by bigger companies due to the quality of it. It's happened countless times in the past. A couple that come to mind at the moment are Bradsoft, Syntrillium, and Giant Software.

I was going to mod you up, but I'll comment.

I say: if you're going for standards compliance, at this point, you almost *have* to hand-code your pages. If you're running Windows, go for TopStyle. It includes HTML Tidy integration and a number of other features.

The problem is, if you're doing more than simple HTML -- and you plan to keep it updated by hand -- these days, Dreamweaver and similar products just boil down to fancy text editors.
Their CSS features are far slower than simply hand-coding the tags, unlike if you were doing this in 1996, where bold and italic and colors would cut it. Dreamweaver, for example, seems to have a horrid understanding of CSS and XHTML, that is to say, you can hand-code, or you can use its "features", but don't plan on both, it's a headache.

I use to use Fireworks for a lot of "automated" web graphics, now I hand-code everything and use Fireworks for the design elements, but no table-based graphics. Web authoring has become so, well, complex -- it's not just HTML any more -- that no product made for the Old Web really cuts it any more than notepad. I'd die to have a program like Fireworks that would export my raw graphics as properly coded CSS, that compiled layers into divs properly, and that -- say I used a rounded corner with 75% transparency -- would write out the CSS3 tags for corners and opacity and have the code degrade properly for browsers that don't support it. Unfortunately, this requires more of a web-document compiler than generator, something more intelligent, that just doesn't exist right now. But someday.

As good as Sage is, it doesn't come near to the quality of FeedDemon.

It needs to have the option to have full text description of the link constantly available, rather than on mouse over.

It needs to have the option of the "Newspaper view", which essentially places all feeds of a type into one view, very useful and nice.

It needs to have a better ability to sort feed topics, folders are nice, but not good enough.

It is just not FeedDemon.

Mine are pretty simple.

A graphical history record (i.e. one that keeps a stored image of places where I've been, rather than a mere text description, as most give very limited info of what that particular site was).

And, an RSS reader equivalent to FeedDemon.

From the article: But where is all this going? Ah yes, the famous Commoditization of Software. So all software will be free in the future, simply because it will be dominated by Open Source and free software. But who is going to pay for it all? You can't develop in a vacuum, *somebody* has to pay the developers. It seems to me that the only way to do it is for all the Open Source developers to be working at large companies, with the large companies paying a salary for the developer to work on the Open Source project for some portion of their time. That's fine, I have no problem with that concept, but it's *not* "free". The software is effectively being supported by the charity of corporations.

Where did he see charity? "Big corporations" support open source software because they __use__ open source software. They pay for development and get benefits.

What he does complain about, I think, is that software development has stopped to be a "cottage industry" from which a single developer could make a living.

It is true - for each trivial piece of commercial software there will appear an open source alternative. And complex software is ...well, complex and requires more man/hours than a single developer can provide.

There are exception, though. Nick Bradbury makes a living out his two retail applications: TopStyle and FeedDemon. Both have open source equivalents, but each is an excellent pieces of software and the best in its class.

We test using the following on web apps:

• Target browsers for intranet apps (even though we use standards as much as practically possible)
• W3C validators for HTML, CSS, and Links
• Validators within WebSphere Studio (Java, JSP, HTML), HomeSite (HTML) and TopStyle (CSS)
• JavaScript Console and Debugger in Mozilla/Firefox
• JUnit
• Cactus
• People. The users. The project owners. Us. Other web developers on e-mail lists.

• We aren't currently using an automated tool to test the front-end flow, because we haven't found any good, easy-to-use, and cheap tools that support a modern version of DOM/JavaScript usage. If you know of something that you like and works, I'd love to know about it. I've tried httpUnit, but had trouble setting it up and it didn't support all the DOM methods we were using at the time.

I use FeedDemon from Nick Bradbury, the small developer behind the original Homesite. I never bought Homesite a while back so I was happy to support FeedDemon. This guy puts out superior software without bloat and with excellent UI. I think it's worth supporting developers like that.

Add that to tabbrowser extensions, to get the tabs reacting the way I want(i.e everything in the same browser window, middle mouse click on the tabbar opens an accidently closed tab). And you almost have my perfect browser.

Now if only Sage would accept OPML properly, with the option of organizing all the RSS feeds within a given folder into a newspaper like format(Sort of like how feedDemon works) I would be in heaven.

• Putty - A free (GPL) SSH terminal emulator
• Winzip - Yeah, you know what this is
• VLC - Free media player
• OpenOffice.org - I should stop doing these descriptions, its not as if youve heard of these things before!
• GIMP for windows - Yup, the infernal/eternal image editor
• Sharpdevelop - Free (GPL) .net IDE, requires the .net framework and SDK
• Bloodshed Dev-C++ - Excellent free (GPL) C and C++ IDE, using the Windows GCC port
• Thunderbird - Mail client
• Firefox - Web browser
• Adobe Acrobat Reader - PDF Reader
• PDFcreator - GPL PDF print driver for windows
• MessengerPro (Clickatell) - Non free SMS sender for windows, company does good bulk buy sms rates, i buy 500 at a time for less than $5
• Lavasoft Adaware and Spybot SS - For the essentials in life
• Topstyle - Free version of the excellent CSS editor for webdevelopment, if anyone knows a good free alternative, im open to suggestions :)
• SmartFTP - Great free for personal use FTP client, not found a better one yet! (I have, Filezilla it is excellent AND fully GPL, none of this non free shit, bub. :-) )
• MySQL-Front - Old version of the MySQL windows front end, much much better than the new one you pay for. Source isnt open and the old developer discontinued development, possibly one of the best advertisements for why OSS is good :(
• Editplus - Possibly the best editor ive found, not free im afraid, costs around $25

VLC -, like you mentioned, Free media player is a great media player, it blew me away. Better then Window's media player, and I know that my porno viewing habits are not going straight to Bill Gates.

One you didn't mention is Filezilla which is a good GPL ftp program instead of SmartFTP if you want to try another one out. (I must confess I use LeechFTP since I haven't gotten use to Filezilla just yet, although if you are into hosting files Filezilla is even better).

OpenOffice
Crimson Editor (programmer's editor; free, not open source)
Audacity (WAV editor)
CDex (ripper)
Firefox
Thunderbird
Navicat (MySQL admin tool)
MySQL Snap (MySQL backup tool)
Top Style (CSS Editor)
Photoshop (Gimp ain't ready for primetime yet. Sorry.)

That's 10. Next up: WinAmp, WS-FTP, AdAware, and 17 million IE/Win patches.

I used Dreamweaver for a long time, as it was convenient and relatively easy (and the library and template features were nice).

Unfortunately, the problem is that, as others have noted here, using such corporate comforts protects you from doing things the right way.

I think what you should be thinking about is a content management system, wherein your content is easily editable (live and online) and the system makes you work with templates in the right way (i.e., using CSS). For my current job, I wound up rolling my own CMS, using PHP for the front end and to generate HTML, and MySQL to keep track of templates. For a live content editor, I'm using Ephox, which is a great product but costs a pretty penny. I started out with Spaw, but it doesn't generate XHTML and can only be used in IE.

There are a ton of CMSs out there -- I just found that most of them were overkill for my website. (And the open source ones generally use IE-centric products for live content editing.) Just go to sourceforge and search for "CMS". Mambo is one of the better ones I've seen.

Oh, and I second the nomination of Crimson Editor as a good programmer's text editor. (Free, as in beer.) For CSS, I use Top Style (not free, but excellent).

FeedDemon. It's a fantastic piece of software, everything *just works*.

It's commercial but worth the price!

FeedDemon is one of the best but unfortunately the final release is only a trial version. It's made by the same guy who made the awesome TopStyle CSS editor.

FeedDemon is one of the best but unfortunately the final release is only a trial version. It's made by the same guy who made the awesome TopStyle CSS editor.

FeedDemon is probably the most powerful Win32 RSS reader available. It supports tons of unique features like merging of feeds into a single "newspaper" of today's events.

• Cocoon
• Dreamweaver Extentions
• TopStyle
• etc

My primary editor for quick changes or extensive text manipulation when working with the filetypes mentioned is gVim. That has already been well discussed, I wanted to mention a few other things that I end up using a lot. :)

1. VS.NET -- Really darn expensive if your shop doesn't have an MSDN Universal subscription, but it handles everything minus JSP with ease. Very sophisticated syntax highlighting and autocompletion, a very good JavaScript debugger, graphical HTML layout, decent CSS editing. It can handle Java syntax through it's JSharp roots, but it ignores JSP. There might be a way to kludge that, but I don't know.

2. CodeGuide is fantastic at Java and JSP. It can syntax highlight HTML as well, but it doesn't do much for JavaScript/CSS. It is the best debugger for Java I've ever seen. Priced at $500, it was well worth it for me.

3. TopStyle Pro is the best CSS editor I've seen out there. So many features. $80.00

*sigh*

All that IE does for Quicken is allow Quicken to use it as an HTML renderer. This is much different than Mozilla which can create a standalone application. The Quicken developers had to use C++ of VB or whatever and embed the MSHTML control into it. Mozilla does not require anything in addition to the package itself to create a new application. So even though this isn't necessarily new, it's definitely a lot more than IE can do on it's own. Plus you can embed Mozilla into apps like Quicken as well. Topstyle does a great job of integrating IE and Mozilla side by side using this technology.