Flash-MX: News

Similar to my NewsGator post of last week, Stardock (makers of WindowBlinds) has announced their blog reader, Blog Navigator.

Blog Navigator offers the following features:

• Blog Navigator will automatically pre-fetch articles in a given group for faster reading.


• Blog Navigator is useful just as an incredibly powerful Internet Explorer compatible web browser with full tab support, archiving, and more.


• Optionally have articles be previewed before clicking on them.


• Archived blogs can be read as .MHT files for off-line reading.


• Newspaper mode can group different blogs as a consistent web page to read.

And the best part? It's free (although they do also have a Pro version with a few extra features).

Stardock's Blog Navigator launches [via Six Apart]

And the million dollar question, what are the features (shared by both the Free and Pro versions):

Pre-Fetching
Blog Navigator will automatically download all the articles on a particular blog for faster reading.

Off-Line Reading
Articles can be set to be pinned for off-line reading.

Blogsphere Searching
Users can create automated searches using Feedstar and other search engines and put together the results as if they were a blog themselves.

Blog Grouping
Users can organize various blogs together into groups and have the group header be the sum of all the blogs in that group.

Tabbed Browsing
Blog Navigator can open up multiple blog windows in its own Internet Explorer compatible browser. Alternatively, different blogs can be displayed as tiled windows.

Blog Baskets
Users can drag and drop articles of interest into blog baskets for safe keeping to reference later.

Export articles
Users can export articles or entire blogs to disk at web archives (standard .mht files) to read later or send to others.

Auto RSS feed detection
Most RSS readers require users to explicitly type in the RSS feed URL. Blog Navigator can detect the RSS feed from the actual blog site that has properly supported the RSS protocol (i.e. http://www.joeuser.com) so that you don't have to hunt around for the RSS feed.

Import RSS feeds
Blog Navigator can import OPML files along with most other common (and uncommon) RSS feed formats so that you can migrate to Blog Navigator quickly and easily.

The Pro version ($20) offers the following additional features:

Manage blog accounts
Blog Navigator supports a host of different blog creation protocols ranging from Moveable Type, Blogger, Metaweblog, JoeUser, and more and has the settings already set up for most of the popular blog sites.

Write blogs
Writing a blog with Blog Navigator pro is as easy as writing an email. A built in rich text editor with categorization features are included.

Edit blogs
Go back to one of your blogs and change it.