FeedDemon – the best desktop RSS feed reader for Windows, in my view – will soon be out in a new version 2.8.

As is typical in much software development these days, beta versions of the new release are publicly available for testing or trying out, always with the caveat that they are beta versions and so unexpected things might happen.

I’ve been using FeedDemon since version 1.5 betas back in 2004; I’m currently on the latest 2.7 release version. But I’m trying the 2.8 betas, the latest one being beta 3 released for testing today.

This further iteration of 2.8 development continues to make FD a smooth operator. From the beta 3 release notes, highlights of some key features:

• Tagging: FeedDemon’s new tagging features enable you to assign your own keywords to items, making it easy to classify and locate articles you’ve previously read. To assign a tag to an item, simply click the tag icon under the item’s headline.
• Really simple sharing: Sharing articles is now much simpler – just click the Share icon to add an item to the RSS feed for your shared clippings. And keep in mind that you can still share any web page by drag-and-dropping a hyperlink or browser tab to your shared clippings.
• Simpler, cleaner user interface: We’ve streamlined FeedDemon’s UI, cured the toolbutton overload of previous versions, and made a number of "tweaks" which improve the overall experience of using FeedDemon (such as adding page transitions, improving support for Windows themes, and using a fixed header in the newspaper).
• Even faster and more reliable: FeedDemon has always been fast (after all, its name is a play on the phrase "speed demon"), but now it’s even faster! And thanks to the built-in error reporting, we’ve identified and resolved the most common problems our customers encountered in earlier versions.

You can read more detail about many of the new features on developer Nick Bradbury’s blog.

If beta 3 works well, then I’d expect to see the first release candidate (RC) soon, meaning the final release would be quite close.

Worth waiting for.