Sunday, July 25, 2004 - Sun, 25 Jul 2004

The August 2004 issue of PC World listed FeedReader in their “Best Free Software” article. It is another free News Aggregator software like SharpReader with a difference: it is Open Source. What really surprised me when I checked out their site was that it was written in Delphi.

Now this peaked my interest. I downloaded it and found it to be fast-opening, something SharpReader is not. It seemed to lack a few things that I’m sure will be added over time, such as dragging and dropping the XML icon from a webpage to add a feed.

I always like to browse the code of Delphi Open Source programs for ideas and techniques that I might be able to apply to Behold. I knew, however, that FeedReader would be using Delphi 7 or later, since that was when XML was built into the Delphi language. I’m still using Delphi 4, so I can’t use any of the new built in stuff yet.

I’m not going to be upgrading my copy of Delphi at least until I release version 1. I’m too familiar with the effects of doing so in the middle of development. Too many things stop working. It’s best to get a stable version first.