Next step – Iceman
Where things stood
For a long stretch, Torsten hadn’t had the time or the energy to keep working on new features or bug fixes for RSS Bandit. Health issues during that period limited his involvement to keeping the site running and staying loosely connected to the codebase, rather than active development.
What changed his mind
Two things brought the project’s future back into focus: Google Reader’s shutdown, and reports that RSS Bandit wasn’t running well on Windows 8. The question became whether to let the project quietly fade, or do something about it.
His decision was to follow a similar path to Nick Bradbury’s plan for FeedDemon — another well-known RSS reader in the same position: ship one intermediate release, without a major interface overhaul, to address the most pressing issues on the current codebase. That release was codenamed Iceman, continuing the project’s practice of naming releases individually rather than just by version number.
What Iceman aimed to fix
- Remove Google Reader as a feed source, since the service itself was shutting down
- Get the app running properly on Windows 8
- Support both x86 and x64 systems (AnyCPU)
- Address the most important open bugs and some community-requested feature requests
- Backport some code from the in-progress 2.0 branch
Some of this work was already done by the time of this post; the rest depended on which bugs and features the community prioritized through voting on SourceForge. The target was to finish within the month.
The bottom line
As the post put it: RSS Bandit wouldn’t be dead as long as someone in the community kept the open-source project alive.
