'feed me' RSS Reader gets a major overhaul

feed me, my RSS reader for WP7, started out as a personal project due to the lack of an app that met my needs. All I really wanted was to be able to group feeds together so I could read all the latest articles for a specific area of interest without constantly switching between views. So in late February feed me 1.0 hit the market. This version was a simple but fast and easy to use ATOM, RSS and RDF reader that organized feeds into groups for easy browsing.

I quickly realized that there was still a long way to go before I had something that I would be completely happy with… and so I started to redo a few things. The programmer in me has since taken over and feed me has had three updates in the last two weeks adding a huge amount of functionality and a lot of improvements. It is now at the stage where I honestly feel it is one of the better RSS apps out there – but hey, it is my app 🙂

You can view a full change list on the website, but here are a few of the highlights from the recent updates:

• Live tile shows new article count
• Tweet articles
• Add articles to Instapaper or Read it Later
• View or listen to podcasts
• Allow feed me to run under the lock screen (allowing feeds to be updated when the phone is locked)
• Supports all windows-125* and ISO-8859-* encodings
• Add new feeds from Google Reader
• Backup and restore settings to our server

On top of this here are some of the key features that have been around since Version 1.0:

• Support for ATOM, RSS and RDF feed formats
• E-mail articles or send the link in a SMS
• A Google feed search for adding new feeds
• Filtering of views using the title and/or content
• Favorites for bookmarking items
• Offline browsing of previously downloaded content

feed me supports English and German and costs a mere $1,29 and is available from Marketplace here (opens Zune). There is also a fully functional trial version. This version has a limit of four groups with a maximum of four feeds each. It is also limited to a single feed for the live tile and does not support audio and video content (e.g. podcasts).

There is, however, no time limit on the trial, so if you can live with these restrictions then you can consider this a free app.