After much waiting, the developer has finally released a beta of the application.

It’s very fast, taking only a couple seconds to launch. The interface is slick, particularly the pane that displays the current feed item. Caffeinated does a very good job at formatting the text and resizing images to fit cleanly into the content.

Of course, Reeder is also being beta tested now. Since news of Caffeinated started circulating around the internet, some competitors have shown up. Reeder, in particular, stands out. It will be interesting to see which app comes out of beta first, and how users react.

Caffeinated RSS Reader for Mac Finally Out As Beta [Macstories]

I decided to take this as an opportunity to compare “normal” feed readers with my own MyNT RSS reader. How? I kept a record of the amount of time it took to read my RSS feeds for a total of one week (using MyNT). Next, I repeated the test with FeedDemon. Here is a chart of the results:

Interesting, isn’t it? The red line represents FeedDemon, and the green MyNT. The dates are 1/6/08 to 1/12/08 for MyNT, and 1/13/08 to 1/19/08 for FeedDemon.

There are things I like about both readers. I really like being able to instantly tell whether a feed has new items in it (a feature not included in MyNT), for example. Really though, I’m not about to switch over from MyNT. I just prefer to read RSS feeds differently than most people (a byproduct of Firefox Live Bookmarks being my first feed reader). Instead, I’m going to keep improving MyNT. I plan to start work on MyNT 2.0 in the near future (read: sometime this year when I have time). Some of the features I’d like to include in MyNT 2 are

• categorical “folders” to organize feeds
• a way of telling whether or not a feed has new items in it (though it would work in a different, possibly better, way than FeedDemon)
• an easier way to find feeds that other users read (a directory of sorts)
• “private” feeds that you must be logged-in to view
• easier feed management

I really want to release a more polished product this time around, a web app that doesn’t feel like it was thrown together in a week (it actually took over a month, working alone, but you get the idea).