Life is grand

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Originally uploaded by Peter Guthrie.

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Originally uploaded by eviltwin.

Google’s feed reader has undergone a radical redesign. So radical it now resembles every other feed reader out there. The previous incarnation was loved by a few and disliked by many. It was an interesting experiment but was not succesful, unlike the GMail interface.

At first glance it is a Bloglines copy; 2 panes showing feeds on one side and items on the other. You click a feed or folder and all the unread items are displayed in a river of news down the right. You can organise by folder, you can star items, email them, share (more on that later) and add tags. Nothing exceptional and certainly not stunning (I am worried when people call a minor step forward as “stunning.”)

There are some good features though and I imagine Google Reader will follow GMail in being an incrementally improving product.

The share feature lets you mark an item as shared and this is then added to a publically available web-page which has its own Atom feed. This is useful as it lets you broadcast to the world any items you find interesting.

It is limited though in that you can’t branch the sharing out to different groups. Thankfully the tagging feature comes into play here. You can add tags to any item and then make that tag public. You can then share the public tag link with other Google Reader users and they can subscribe to it. You could tag items to target specific groups of friends and co-workers. This is a very useful feature though I’d prefer if it displayed as the sharing feature does as currently the public tags require you to be using the Google Reader.

Another novel feature is that, unlike Bloglines where clicking a feed or folder marks all unread items in it as read, Google Reader will track your scrolling and only mark as read the items you have scrolled past. This makes it very easy to start reading a list of unread items, close the reader and then come back to where you last where.

Starring like in GMail works well, useful for coming back to items later to read. The feed management interface is a bit clunky but works well enough for now.

One thing I have noticed is that Bloglines seems to be faster both in using and in noticing updates in feeds. Hopefully Google Reader catches up in those two regards.

All in all it is Bloglines plus some useful features and mechanisms. I like it but feel it is hardly ground breaking and that there is so much more potential in aggregator applications. I will be swapping to Google Reader not because it is stunning but because it is mildly better.

The Times Reader is an interesting project between the New York Times and Microsoft. For Microsoft it is a technology demonstration, in this case .NET 3.0 (WinFX really) and for the Times it is an exploration of delivering readable content to screens. The web and even most desktop software makes for a bad reading experience. Low DPI, wide blocks of text, poor fonts and, especially on the web, little if any typograhic control.

The Times Reader aims to make reading on the screen easy on the eyes. Using the Microsoft technology it offers the Times’ fonts, builds in readable columns and uses up all the screen real estate it can to present what looks very much like a print newspaper on your screen.

Here are a few screenshots of it in action though I recommend you download it and give it a go to see the layout technology at work (it is a Windows XP/Windows Vista only app, no Mac or Linux versions.)

When you first load it the app downloads a complete set of articles from the server. It then periodically synchronises allowing you to later use the app and read articles offline. As you can see it mimics a newspaper layout. On the right you will see some articles are just being displayed as headlines. If I made the window bigger the summaries of each would start to be displayed and the layout would change.

Along the top you have the different sections which smoothly flips the view from topic to topic.

Here you can see the front page after I have resized the window to a smaller area.

Clicking a headline/article takes you to the article view:

The article is nicely displayed in columns and flows around the image. You can see an advert in this screenshot but not all articles display an advert. If the full article was too long to fit on this one view then the page control (bottom right) would let me flip to the next page. It is a bit fiddly though as you have to click the little arrows rather than a bigger region.

You can also see the text-size control in the bottom left. As you adjust this the view automatically re-flows itself to fit. Honestly though the sizing is in steps and is quite jumpy. I’d have preffered something smoother.

You can go to the next article using the control near the bottom right. The arrows are once again a bit small but the transition to the next article is quite smooth.

An article has several tools one of which lets you annotate with a pen. Handy if a bit limited (other users can’t see it for instance.)

The search has three views one of which is this fluid diagram that shows an article with its assigned “topics” radiating out from it. Topics are much like tags.

Clicking on a topic takes you to a view which shows all articles tagged with that topic:

The other search view shows a grid layout of all stories that match your search, sorted by relevance (as indicated by the litte filled in dots):

Then onto the News in Pictures view which is very, very simple:

It simply takes all the photos in the paper and displays them one after the other with captions. A gallery would have been ideal and also links back to the originating articles.

I am not convinced of the usefulness of the What’s Read but it is an interesting view. It shows you each section with little squares that on roll-over display an article you have read. I would have liked an indicator next to each article title on any page to show that I have read it (much like links on the web change colour.)

All in all the Times Reader is interesting and works quite well. My main problem with it is that it is a separate, desktop app. bound to one OS. We need to get this technology into the browser.

User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky is a worthwhile read though there are better books on the subject out there (e.g. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug (which Joel recommends too.)) The information is good though I find Joel’s tone to be grating. This is the same Joel of Joel on Software fame and as I have said before the man has good things to say but says them in the most awful ways. Arrogant is the main word that comes to mind. Steve Krug in comparison respects users and avoids calling them morons at every turn.

What Joel has to say on the program model vs. the user model is very helpful though. If that is all you get from the book then you are doing well.

So if you have an hour or two free (the book is short) and have read the other books on the subject give Joel’s a shot.

This might seem a bit “me too” but it would seem all the Ruby on Rails developers on Mac who use TextMate actually have a clue. This is a really good text editor. Good enough that I just paid €39 for it. The “project” fly-out is simple and brilliant, no meta project files or strange directory structure requirements; it just shows everything under the directory you specify. The bundles work well too providing shortcuts and intelligent text handling for a variety of tasks e.g. HTML, CSS and Ruby on Rails.

All in all a great tool, go give it a try.

I really am a card carrying Rails on Mac user now.

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Originally uploaded by pedro vidigal.

One benefit Mac users will often tout over Windows users is that of restarting after software updates. I thought his was true but frankly my Mac restarts after software updates about as much as my Windows installation did. Here you can see some basic bits getting updated and I have to restart afterwards. So don’t think there are no more restarts in OS X, there are plenty. However the restarts are a damned sight faster than Windows XP at least.

Also I thought I’d point out that all is solved by OS X, even world conflicts:

I’ve been sitting on WebTwoZero.com for too long and want to sell it. Has anyone had any luck with eBay or a site like Sedo? I reckon it is worth a few bob.

I had some plans for it but my day time job is going so well I don’t really need to be hassling with side projects.

The mobile TLD is launching today; dotMobi. The BBC has a decent article on it. Firstly I find it ironic that the domain designed for limited input devices (like mobile phones) is four letters long; .mobi.

Is this going to work though? Or do we even need it? The way I see it we should enter in a domain regardless of the device and get back data tailored to the device. So if I view cnn.com on my desktop I get a nice multimedia, multi-megabyte download. If I hit it on my phone I should get a lightweight package with navigation designed for phone keypads. I shouldn’t have to use different domains.

One good thing about dotMobi is the set of rules dotMobi sites have to adhere to. They emphasise content and small downloads with good access strategies for phone keypads. But really those rules should be applied to all mobile sites irregardless of what domain is being used.