Franklin, Tennessee's Nick Bradbury is the man behind three popular pieces of software—HomeSite, an HTML editor; TopStyle, a CSS editor; and now FeedDemon, an award-winning Windows-based aggregator. Before turning to software development, Bradbury was a cartoonist.

Harold Check: FeedDemon 1.1 just came out. How has it been received?

Nick Bradbury: It's been very well received. The day it was released, PC World made it their "Editor's Pick" over every other feed reader.

HC: Luke Hutteman showed a pretty nice growth curve in 2004 for his free feed reader. Have you been encouraged by the numbers on the pay side of the reader business?

NB: I'm pleased with the sales of FeedDemon, but so far sales haven't been enough to support a larger company. I expect this to change—dramatically—over the next two years.

HC: How did you approach FeedDemon? Do you have a vision you're working towards, or is user feedback the main driver behind changes to the software?

NB: With all of my products I've certainly had a vision that I've worked towards—after all, if you don't have a clear idea of your product's goals, you invariably end up with a bloated hodge-podge of an application a few versions down the road.  However, user feedback has been my navigator.  For example, with TopStyle I've had "user votes" that determine which features get implemented, but I made sure to add my own features to keep things headed in the right direction.

The common theme in all my work has been to simplify things that have been far too complicated (or time consuming) for even power users to deal with, so feedback from those struggling with all the unnecessary annoyances of today's software is vital.

HC: What do you make of the standards wars? As a developer, does it bother you to spend time addressing multiple formats and the uncertainty of future formats? Are you in touch with any of the keepers of the current standards?

NB: Well, let's just say that given my past experience with HomeSite and TopStyle, the syndication standards war seems quaint in comparison to some other standards battles I've witnessed.

Honestly, I view the current battle as a necessary evil despite the collateral damage it's causing.  A single, well-defined specification would be nice, but reality is always messier than our hopes.  Sometimes multiple standards are necessary to address everyone's needs.  And even when there is a single standard, implementations often vary so widely that they could each be considered their own specification (witness browser support for CSS).

I admire the simplicity of RSS—it's a big reason why syndication has taken off—but I also understand that it's too poorly defined in some places to make it suitable for everyone.  However, while the Atom spec does address some of the problems with RSS, I do hope they remember the value of simplicity.  This will be especially important if the W3C becomes involved (which, by the way, I now hope they do), since their "semantic web" goals are a little, well, less than comprehensible to mere mortals such as myself.

Anyway, supporting multiple standards in FeedDemon is a bit of a pain, but it's proved far from difficult.  I am in touch with some of the "keepers" of the standards, several of whom have been very helpful, but I remain on the sidelines in the actual war.  Users of my software rarely care about anything unless it stops working, so the whole Atom vs. RSS battle is a sideshow.

HC: Do you think that standalone readers will ultimately flourish? Or is feed-reading destined to morph back into existing web clients — on either the client or server side?

NB: I don't think it's an either-or proposition.  Just like email clients flourish despite web-based solutions such as HotMail, so will desktop feed readers.  Server-side solutions certainly simplify some things—chiefly synchronization—but they do so at the expense of flexibility and depth of features.

HC: Bookmarks (and bookmark managers) became less useful as the number of websites skyrocketed. What will happen when syndication becomes much more pervasive?

NB: Search engines will replace RSS bookmarks, just as they did with HTML.  I rely on Google more often than my browser's bookmarks, and I rely on search engines like Feedster for blogs.

As more and more people start reading feeds, the importance of finding information increases.  This is why features like watches and search channels were part of the very first version of FeedDemon, and will continue to be a focus in future releases.

HC: Do you have any suggestions for Feedster? Any feature requests?

NB: Feedster is doing a great job so far, but they could benefit from synchronization with desktop aggregators.