NewsGator Desktop Sync - Main Window / Tray Icon

Desktop Sync is a system tray application, so you can always tell when it's running by looking for the icon in your system tray.  This icon can be animated while Desktop Sync is synchronizing with NewsGator Online (I'll explain how to turn this off in my next post), or show you when there has been an error (which I'll explain later in this post).

The first time you run Desktop Sync you'll be walked through a configuration wizard which should hopefully be very user friendly.  If you see something that doesn't make sense or the wording is confusing, drop a note in the Desktop Sync forum.

The main window of Desktop Sync shows the current synchronization status of all of your feeds:

Each feed will be marked with a status of Unknown (the feed's sync status is not known), OK (feed has been synced), or Error (the Windows RSS Platform could not download the feed).

If you double click on a feed that has an error status, you'll see why Windows was unable to download the feed (FYI - my example uses Kevin Cawley's old feed which was invalid - he's since moved his blog here... sorry Kevin :-) [Kevin is the developer of NewsGator Mobile]):

Some of these feeds can be processed by NewsGator Online, so you may see unread posts in NewsGator that cannot be synchronized with the Windows RSS Platform.

The status bar of the main window will also show you when it has encountered an error:

When Desktop Sync is unable to communicate with NewsGator Online for any reason, the tray icon will change to so that you'll know that changes are not being processed.  If you see this and cannot figure out what's wrong, you can always use the Help > Submit Support Request menu option to send an email to NewsGator Support.

In my next post I'll talk about the different configuration options you can set in Desktop Sync along with a couple keyboard shortcuts that could come in handy.