Google Reader on your Desktop with RSS Bandit

I’ve been looking around for a while for a desktop RSS reader that would synchronize with Google Reader.  I like being able to have all of my feeds accessible from anywhere with Google Reader, but I also like having my feeds downloaded into a client that I can check without having to visit a website.  Lately, I’ve been just subscribing to some of my more favorite feeds through Thunderbird so I can check them when I check my email.  I haven’t even been checking my Google Reader account for the past few weeks.  Now, I read about this desktop RSS reader called RSS Bandit over at Ghacks, which just released a new alpha version that synchronizes with Google Reader.

The RSS Bandit program looks like Outlook, which I’m not that familiar with, but it seems easy to use.  I’m not sure how often RSS Bandit synchronizes with Google Reader since I saw no option for it.  I had it do the initial synchronization, then I went through and marked my feeds as read.  Then I logged on to Google Reader, and it hadn’t been updated yet.  I’m assuming it will be updated in an hour or so.  I’m hoping that in the beta or the release version that it will have some way to change the rate at which it synchronizes with Google Reader.

Another feature worth noting is that you can share items with your Google Reader account by clicking on the share icon in the top left corner of each feed item.  However, I haven’t seen any way of starring an item, which I seem to use more than sharing.  Also, if you use the Newsgator online reader rather than Google Reader, it will also synchronize with that.

I’m definitely going to keep my eye on this program.  I’ll try it out to see how it works, but I’d definitely like to see some extra features added in.  I might just wait for a while until it is a little more stable to use it.