Category Archives: Technology

Fed up with Feed Readers

It’s probably unrealistic to expect to ever find the perfect RSS reader for my own feed consumption habits, but boy is it frustrating that I can’t. I’ve been looking for years, trying every solution I can get my hands on. But compared to the feed management tools that were available as long as five years ago, it feels as if there’s been only incremental progress.

This is at least partly due to the essentially non-industrial nature of RSS reading. Whether you’re a casual RSS consumer or an expert, the majority of feed consumption does not directly produce income or revenue for the consumer. Rather, it’s an activity that’s highly personal in nature, and so naturally subject to a greater variety of individual whims and preferences than, say, word processing. This is why we have RSS functionality in so many different forms: as dedicated desktop clients, embedded in email clients, grafted onto browsers, bundled up as widgets and remotely rendered as Web applications. Not inappropriately, there’s no consensus on how to use this stuff.

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Marketing in a Minute

Ubiquity LogoAza Raskin is one of the smartest people I know, but sadly I have not kept up with his endeavors since before he and some of his colleagues at Humanized joined Mozilla Labs last year. In recent days, he’s popped up on my radar again because his latest product, Ubiquity, has garnered a lot of buzz on the Internets.

While I have great faith in Aza and his team’s talent, and while I’m pretty sure that the product itself is almost certainly worthwhile, I have to be honest: I have no idea what it does. As of this writing, I lack a clear understanding of its function or purpose. This is largely because, though I’ve come across references to it many times, the marketing hasn’t worked for me.

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Whatcha-Mac-allit

imageHere’s what it’s like trying to describe what the Apple TV is to someone who has no idea. Starting first with one simple, brief sentence: It’s a set-top box that hooks up to your television and lets you play all kinds of Internet video as well as stuff from your computer.

The problem is, most people don’t know exactly what you mean when you say “Internet video.” So they always have to ask: You mean YouTube? Yes, definitely. How about stuff from sites like Hulu? Um, no, not easily. Well how about movies and TV shows you can rent from iTunes? Yes, not only that but BitTorrent video, too. What’s BitTorrent? Um, stuff you stole, basically. It also displays your digital photos, too, straight from your iPhoto library. And it features music-sharing via AirTunes, which lets you hear music from your iTunes music library on your home theater setup. Oh so it’s probably a digital video recorder too, right? Um, no, it’s not. Well, it kinda sorta sounds like a media PC, so can I play a DVD or Blu-Ray discs? Sorry, no, not that either.

So basically, in spite of its elegant, compact industrial design (the Apple TV has the look of something extremely elegant and succinct) this product is a freakin’ mystery to most people. But, having owned one now for about three months, let me tell you: it’s a winner. I had little idea what I was really getting into when I bought it, but now I’m a huge, huge fan of my Apple TV. In one respect or another, it’s in constant use in my home.

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A Cloud and a Prayer

imageAmong the many calamitous events that have marked the current global financial crisis, the U.S. government seized the bank Washington Mutual late last month in what was described as “by far the largest bank failure in American history.” For the generations of people, like me, who grew up thinking of the Great Depression as an historical event — something essentially unrepeatable, like say the Black Plague — it’s something of a shocker that a Depression-style implosion on the scale of WaMu could even take place in the 21st Century.

Dramatic reversals of business fortune are a reminder that the constants of commercialized life (in my view, we’re almost all of us living highly commercialized existences) aren’t quite as untouchable as we thought. The concept of “too big to fail” is under siege at the moment. The fact that a company, product or service is so clearly dominant and relied upon is no guarantee of its survival.

In particular, I make this point in regards to Web applications, cloud computing, putting your data online — whatever you want to call it. Over the past decade, consumers have been relying on Web-hosted services to house their information more and more, and on independent stores of data on their personal computers less and less. Forget PCs even. It’s no secret that vanishingly few people are relying on personally maintained copies of records that exist in the home, like say a checkbook register, too.

Many of you reading this right now probably rely on some form of Web application for your email, spreadsheets, word processing, finances, or even to run your business. And that’s just the productivity side: think for a moment about all of the value you’ve created in the social networks you’ve built on say LinkedIn, or the narratives you’ve weaved on Flickr, or the conversations you’ve had on Facebook, or the journaling you’ve done at Tumblr. It’s almost all online, and very little of it is on your computer.

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Messaging and Location, Location, Location

I’m already on the record about how I believe email can be a powerful interface to other applications. A large part of what makes that possible, for me, is Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP. I’ve been accessing my email account via this method for a few years now and it’s made the whole concept of email drastically more useful to me, primarily by liberating me from the specific location where I might have sent or received an email. It works so well, in fact, that now I want it for all the other kinds of messaging that I do too.

For those unfamiliar with it, IMAP leaves messages on the server as well as storing copies locally on your hard drive. It basically gives you the same in box (and sent folder, trash folder, etc.) on any computer you use regularly, or even when you access your account via webmail. Especially for receiving and replying to email from both the office and at home, it’s a huge improvement over its predecessor, POP, which can’t reflect a message sent or received from one computer onto another. What I’d like to see is an extension of the IMAP concept, if not its specification, to similarly manage all the other various kinds of messaging in which I engage regularly.

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Crash Test Dummies

I certainly don’t bemoan the fact that the iPhone now has a robust, creative and genuinely delightful market for sanctioned, third-party applications, but jeebus does my iPhone crash a lot. To me it’s proof positive that, in dividing its attention between this device, Mac OS X, Macintosh hardware, iPods and half-assed Web applications and services, Apple’s previously sterling quality levels have slipped notably. Just try using my post-2.0 update iPhone — or similar iPhones owned by many of my friends — without freezes or crashes. I bet you can’t.

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Investing Strategies for iPhone Customers

iPhone 3GHurray for the iPhone 3G! Really, I’m not mad. I’m kind of excited that 3G is finally coming to the iPhone, and I harbor sufficiently little ill will against Apple for so dramatically lowering the cost of entry to their iPhone platform that I may even go ahead and buy one for myself when it’s released next month.

Looking back at the original iPhone and how that’s worked out, I realize that if there’s anyone that I should be mad at, it’s me. It’s no secret that the value of digital hardware drops precipitously. I guess what’s so surprising — or galling, to many — is just how precipitously the value of an original iPhone, bought in June of last year, has dropped in just twelve months. Take a look at this chart I cooked up.

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Four for iPhone

iPhone AppsLet’s face it, I’ll probably never create an iPhone application of my own. I don’t have the time, for one, and even if I did, I haven’t got the programming talent. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t have some ideas for some applications. And because I’m one of the lucky few who have a blog, I’m not just going to let these ideas go to waste — no, I’m posting them right here instead. To be sure, none of them are game changers, but all of them would find a place on my iPhone’s home screen if someone out there makes them.

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Out of the Box Thinking

Seagate FreeAgentGenerally, I think it’s great when companies adopt a bit of the customer-friendly approach to designing and packaging products that most of us have come to associate with Apple. I’m talking about the premise that, even after the consumer has handed over her money for a physical product, the process of opening up its packaging and using it for the first time should be as seductive and reassuring as was the experience of having been sold on it in the first place — if not more enjoyable, even.

Take, for example, this external hard drive that I bought recently from Seagate: an inexpensive model called the FreeAgent. I’ve never thought of Seagate, a well-respected hard drive manufacturer but not a particularly friendly brand, as being very consumer-focused, but I have to admit they surprised me. Mostly.

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Subscribing to RSS Theory

You know that drawer you have in your kitchen that’s full of rubber bands, pens, take-out menus, birthday candles, miscellaneous kitchen utensils, string, magnets and all sorts of other junk? That, to me, is what my RSS reader feels like. No matter how much I try to organize it, it’s always in disarray, overflowing with unread posts and encumbered with mothballed feeds.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending chunks of time here and there trying to clean out the drawer, so to speak, organizing the many, many feeds that I’ve haphazardly stashed inside various folders and subfolders within NetNewsWire. My goal has been to group them into some sort of hierarchy that will allow me to make better use of them, to cluster them together logically. Not necessarily by content type, but rather in use-oriented ways, like how often they’re published or how often I tend to read them.

The whole process frustrates me though, mostly because I feel like I shouldn’t have to do it at all. The software should just do it for me. I acknowledge that some customization is often — if not always — necessary to get the most efficient use out of any given software. But moreso than with most classes of software, it’s my feeling that RSS readers shortchange users with only half of the features we need to get the job done.

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