A simple but essential addition to Google Reader; while reading you can now move subscriptions to different folders.
Previously it was a pain to subscribe to a feed and then have to go into Settings to move it to a folder.
FeedDemon’s solution to a tough problem is elegant and simple. The problem is how does one find popular items within the feeds one cares about. Other systems are applying all sorts of voting systems, tagging pools, text analysis and “machine learning” which is all well and good but often doesn’t work quite the way one expects.
FeedDemon says “count the number of referrals and list from highest to lowest.” Simple. That it is applied just to the feeds you are subscribed to makes it so much more powerful. You have already gone to the trouble of selecting the feeds you care about so why throw that out in favour of some complex “blogosphere wide” analysis engine that gets it wrong a good deal of the time.
Microsoft Max started out as an interesting technology demonstration around photos. It has now strangely added RSS to its bag of tricks.
While it is not meant to become your default feed aggregator it does have some interesting techniques to watch out for. The newspaper layout is nothing new to feed aggregators but this one is done particularly well with what I think is the best flow and layout around. It also makes use of the powerful typographic rendering of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation.) The feed list down the left is also nicely done and useful for non-power users who only have a few subscriptions. It displays the latest bit of news in the actual subscription list.
If you have a google account and allow Google to record your searches you can go to google.com/searchhistory/trends to view your own search trends. Interesting stuff though not wholly accurate as my top queries seem a bit wrong and I can’t ever remember searching for Teen Tigers (a porn site it turns out.)
Microsoft have released a screenshot of the third colour scheme for Office 2007; silver.
Anybody else feel angry looking at it? I nearly hurled my lunch.
While I happen to think Vista was designed by a jolt drinking, pizza munching geek I also happen to think that Office 2007 looks nice. In its default Blue colour scheme.
This silver scheme is wrong on so many levels but I will mention just one; look at the window title. The bit that reads “Fabrikam Journal - Microsoft Word”
Was a kid with crayons and an etch a sketch allowed to do that shading? Awful. Just awful.
Apologies to the hard working Office team who have done a great job with the new UI but have seemingly, in this latest colour scheme, been forced to use the Vista designer (and apologies to the Vista designer but you need to stop using MSPaint.)
Thanks. That is great. Telling me I can click a checkbox when that checkbox is disabled isn’t too smart chaps.
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