Features

Languages

The interface was translated into eleven languages — English, French, German, Russian, Traditional Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Serbian, and Polish — defaulting automatically to whichever matched your system’s configured language.

Feeds and formats

Full support for Atom 1.0 alongside every common RSS format, so feed type was never a reason a subscription wouldn’t work. Feeds could be organized into nested categories, and a single click auto-discovered a site’s available feeds using Mark Pilgrim’s well-known “ultra-liberal” autodiscovery algorithm.

How long items stuck around could be configured independently of how long they’d actually appeared in the source feed — useful for sites that rotated their feed contents daily but where a longer history was wanted. If a feed’s address changed and the server sent a redirect, the subscription updated automatically instead of quietly breaking. Links — including the classic orange XML feed buttons — could be dragged straight into the app to subscribe.

NNTP and newsgroups

Beyond RSS, RSS Bandit could connect to public NNTP servers, letting you subscribe to newsgroups, read and reply to threads, and post new ones — with permalinks pointing back to the equivalent post on Google Groups.

Syncing across devices

Read/unread state, subscriptions, and folder changes could sync with a NewsGator Online account, keeping a desktop client and a web-based reader in step without double-marking anything as read. For syncing without a shared account — moving between home and work, for instance — RSS Bandit could also sync its full state (search folders, flags, replies, subscriptions) via WebDAV, FTP, or a shared file, bundled into a single zip.

Comments

For blogs supporting the CommentAPI — common on dasBlog and .TEXT-based sites — RSS Bandit could post comments directly. Where a site published its comments as a feed using wfw:commentRss, existing comments appeared alongside the original post. dasBlog users could also upload their blogroll straight from the app.

Reading experience

Item rendering was customizable via XSLT, an embedded browser enabled tabbed browsing without leaving the app, and related items could be grouped into a threaded view similar to an email or newsgroup client. Items could be flagged for follow-up, and a dedicated set of “virtual feeds” collected feed errors, sent comments, and flagged items in one place instead of scattering them through the interface.

Connectivity and performance

RSS Bandit worked behind proxy servers, supported password-protected feeds over SSL and HTTP authentication, and used GZip encoding plus HTTP conditional GET requests to keep bandwidth down when checking feeds for updates.

Search

A built-in toolbar let you search Google, Feedster, or MSN without switching to a browser window.