News and podcasts have the same problem in 2026: there’s more of both than any human could ever get through, and most of the tools claiming to fix that only solve half of it. Curating news and curating podcasts turn out to be genuinely different problems. News curation is mostly about volume and bias —…
Somewhere around your 40th subscribed feed, “just read everything” stops being a reading habit and turns into a part-time job. That’s the point where summarizing RSS feeds with AI actually starts paying off. Instead of scrolling past hundreds of headlines hoping something jumps out, an AI layer reads the full item for you and hands…
Every RSS reader now claims to have “AI” somewhere in its feature list, and almost none of them explain what that actually replaces. That matters more than it sounds like it should, because an AI feed reader and a classic RSS app like RSS Bandit aren’t really competing on features — they’re built on two…
RSS is not dead. It was never dead — it just stopped being fashionable, and fashion has a way of circling back. If you’ve searched “is RSS dead,” you’ve probably landed on a decade of blog posts arguing both sides, most of them stuck in 2013, the year Google Reader shut down and took a…
Your browser doesn’t own the web. It’s just the interface most of us default to — and for a growing number of tasks, it’s not even the fastest way to get information off a page. Maybe you’re SSH’d into a headless server with no GUI. Maybe you’re automating a workflow and don’t want Chrome eating…
In v1.8.0.862, we made a change to the user interface which we thought would be helpful but instead has turned out to be very confusing to our users. The change was to remove to (+) and (-) indicators that let you know whether the top level nodes of a subscription have been expanded or not….
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…
How it works Podcast episodes and other feed enclosures could be downloaded automatically, based on your settings, or manually — right-click an item and choose to download it directly. Managing your downloads Pending downloads had their own dedicated view: View → Download Manager showed every podcast or enclosure currently downloading or queued, all in one…
Release Overview Development on this release focused on rewriting the RSS Bandit interface using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and moving to a ribbon-based UI — work that had to pause briefly to fix a break in Google Reader synchronization caused by a change in how Google Reader handled authenticated requests from client applications. That sync…
Release Overview This release fixes two issues affecting the recent v1.8.0.855 and v1.8.0.862 builds: a bug that could cause feed lists to be lost on upgrade, and a set of interface changes that made existing subscriptions look like they’d disappeared when they hadn’t — covered in more detail in Your feeds aren’t missing. Download the…