I'm in the middle of re-installing  a new hard disk, and as I'm going through I realized that I don’t have a copy of the Newsgator installer around. I've used Newsgator for a while and I like it mainly because it runs in Outlook, otherwise it's a mediocre app at best. So I cruised over the NewsGator site to grab the latest version. Nix. It looks like these guys have become completely corporate Nazis and no longer offer software directly, but only through subscriptions. Oh yes, you can get the Outlook version too, but you have to do some sort of subscription.

One look at the Web site and you can see what’s going on. The site is a design nightmare, that tries to mimic that ‘mature corporate’ look that's trying to appeal - heck I don't know who that appeals to ( big corporate business managers?) -  which is usually a dead giveaway that the beancounters have taken over. I searched around the site trying to find a download link – even finding a reference to the Outlook feature required wading through several pages. In the end you can’t demo anything, but have to start with a subscription.

Eventually I managed to find a link to download the old version 2.0 through a download site, but as far as I can see on the Newsgator site there’s no way to download the software directly.

Maybe this is just me, but I hate paying for a subscription of something that isn’t a subscription even if it is cheap. Subscriptions are just evil in how they leach away money from you a little piece at a time <g>.  Subscriptions just ‘feel’ wrong unless there is actually something you are directly getting for your money – information or a direct service. Software subscriptions are just a rip off in most cases – to make up for the software company’s inability to provide new functionality that might actually make you upgrade a product. Useful as Newsgator is it could use a lot of enhancing actually – the apps only bonus point is that it actually runs inside of Outlook. Other than that – the app is lame. For example, there’s no way to easily delete old posts automatically, and there’s no option to auto-delete old posts. Once a month or so I have to go through and clean out those folders manually with old messages (especially some of the big feeds like the weblogs.ASP.Net feed and MSDN feed aggregators.

Anyway considering this I might switch back to FeedDemon, which I also own...