There’s a new RSS reader on the market – Blog Navigator.
Folllowing beta testing for the past few months, Stardock – about whom I’ve posted on their Windows customization apps – released version 1.0 yesterday.
From the press release:
Blog Navigator is a program designed to make it easy for users who enjoy reading blogs […] to read and organize them. Blog Navigator works by reading RSS feeds and displaying them in a clean, easy to understand way. It includes a host of different news and blog sites for users to read through.
Blog Navigator is arguably the most advanced program of its kind and it’s free. For example, Blog Navigator has the ability to pre-load all the articles on a given blog site to speed up reading. It also has a host of off-line reading features in which a blog site can be exported into a magazine-like format.
Stardock sells an upgrade called Blog Navigator Pro for $19.95 that is designed for bloggers. With the Pro version, users can manage their blog accounts and write/edit articles.
The Pro paid-for version has some interesting-looking attributes, beyond RSS functionality, including support for different blog creation protocols (Stardock mentions Movable Type, Blogger, Metaweblog and JoeUser, its own blog hosting service), and a built-in rich text editor with categorization features.
This sounds like a move into the territory of blog editors like ecto and BlogJet, both of whom are due to release new versions some time soon (see my informal review of both these apps from September). Interesting development.