My job depends on it, literally. I started out with RSS Bandit, which is freeware, but the damned thing started to choke on all my feeds until it got to the point where the application would barely load. I switched to NewzCrawler and that went fine until one day the system crashed and I couldn’t open the application at all any more. Uninstalling, reinstalling, before and after a disk defragmentation — none of it worked. The sucker was well and truly dead.

I decided to take that as my opportunity to switch from standalone readers to browser-based readers and have now settled, uncomfortably, on Google Reader. It works fine, if you don’t mind the fact that it only looks for new posts once an hour or so. That’s way too long for me; I need one like Bandit or NewzCrawler that can be customized to check every 15 minutes, but from what I can tell the other browser-based readers like Bloglines and Rojo are both stuck with fixed periods. I’ve considered switching back to a standalone reader, the obvious candidate for which would be Feed Demon. But try as I might, I can’t figure out how to customize Feed Demon to let me view all new posts by category. That is to say, whereas in Google Reader I can put all my blog feeds into one folder called “Blogs” and then view all the new posts from all the blogs in that folder that have recently updated on one screen, Feed Demon appears to force you to check each updated feed individually. Or am I missing something?

My requirements, then: 15-minute update times, with all new posts in category viewable simultaneously, and ideally browser-based instead of standalone. Any recommendations? Please?

Update: I’m hearing good things in the comments about Omea reader.