Nick Bradbury

A-Listers Are Late to the Stream

Published on May 17, 2009 by Nick Bradbury4 Comments

Lately the geekosphere has been buzzing about how RSS is being replaced by the real-time stream. Instead of getting our information from syndicated blog feeds, we’re now getting it via streams from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, et al.

This isn’t new. The only thing that’s new is that “A-list” bloggers are finally getting wise to it.

Outside the geekosphere, people have long relied on RSS to bring them a real-time stream. But this stream doesn’t flow from Twitter or FriendFeed – it flows from the companies they work for and from the feeds they rely on to do their job.

Since introducing FeedDemon back in 2003, I’ve talked with countless people who are subscribed to feeds which tell them when their company (or a competitor) is mentioned anywhere on the web. They’re subscribed to intranet feeds which let them know when a customer sends a complaint or compliment. They rely on internal feeds to bring them the latest information about other projects going on inside their company, or tell them when an HR policy has changed or when an impromptu company-wide meeting is taking place. More recently, they subscribe to SharePoint feeds which involve them in a real-time conversation with their co-workers. Some of them even have feeds which alert them to the status of their web servers.

These people have relied on RSS-based real-time streams since the first day they used an RSS reader, and I count myself as one of these people. For example, I’m subscribed to several feeds from NewsGator’s FogBugz server which are absolutely critical to me - especially right after a product release – because they bring me error reports that customers send from FeedDemon. If I get several similar error reports, I have to drop everything and focus on figuring out the problem so I can release a fix as soon as possible.

BTW, this is also why the river of news approach doesn’t work for everyone. If you’re subscribed solely to feeds from popular blogs and web sites, a river of news is ideal – you get a flow of information that you can scan for stuff that looks interesting. If you miss a story, no big deal – it’ll float by later if it’s important.

But if you’re also subscribed to feeds critical to your business, this approach is unacceptable. You don’t want a flow of uncategorized, unprioritized information that combines articles from Boing Boing with items from your company’s internal feeds. You need separation between the stuff you read for fun and the stuff you read because it’s critical to your job.

Download Size Still Matters

Published on May 12, 2009 by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

Better get a bucket Is it just me, or has the size of downloadable software ballooned ridiculously over the past few years?

Call me old school, but this bothers me. It’s like some developers assume their software is so damn good that it’s okay if it takes a long time for you to download it. Their software is so fantastic that it deserves to occupy a ton of space on your hard drive.

Yes, I know, hard drive space is cheap, and high-speed internet is supposedly everywhere these days. But that’s not the point.

The point is this: if you’re a desktop developer, then your software has to compete with web applications. You know, those applications that you run by simply typing a URL into the address bar?

Can you imagine typing www.google.com into your address bar and then waiting for a couple hundred megabytes to download before you could use it? Can you imagine visiting a web site that required you to reboot your computer? Or one that required you to install a ton of updates before you could visit it? How popular do you think these sites would be?

If you’re a desktop developer, don’t make the mistake of thinking your software only competes against other bloated desktop applications. It also has to compete with web applications that don’t require downloading anything.

The days when you could get away with a 100+MB download just to try out your software are long gone. You want to stay competitive? Shrink your download and streamline your install. Make the download so miniscule that trying it out is a no-brainer.

PS: The latest FeedDemon 3.0 beta is a 3.4MB download :)

Is Your RSS Reader Broken?

Published on May 5, 2009 by Nick Bradbury15 Comments

Dare Obasanjo believes that RSS readers which are modeled after email clients are broken:

“…it seems to me that the way we think of RSS readers needs to fundamentally change. Presenting information as a news feed where the user isn’t pressured to read every item or feel like a failure is one way to move the needle on the user experience here.”

I couldn’t agree more. The fact that FeedDemon’s Panic Button is one of its most popular features is a clear sign that information overload resulting from “RSS as email” is a problem among my customers.

It’s no secret that I regret designing the first version of FeedDemon to work like an email client, and every version since then has been an attempt to drag myself and my customers (some of them screaming and kicking) away from that model. It’s been such a slow crawl out of that hole that I’ve often considered building something brand new instead of trying to morph FeedDemon into a tool that doesn’t make information consumption a chore.

But then I come to my senses, realize that I love being able to focus on FeedDemon, and get back to making it into the application it should be :)

So what do I think it should be? I think an RSS reader should enable you to read individual feeds if that’s what you’re into, but at the same time it should sift through the noise and find the articles that interest you.

Many services attempt to do that by aggregating the most popular articles around the web, but I’m not a fan of that approach since it brings you too much stuff you don’t care about (you might not, for example, care about Britney Spears regardless of whether everyone else does). Instead, my approach has been to have FeedDemon pay attention to the stuff you’re paying attention to, and use that to locate the stuff that’s most relevant.

You can see this most clearly in features like “Popular Topics” (which shows you the most popular articles across all your feeds), and the new dashboard-like start page in FeedDemon 3.0. If you’re unfamiliar with FeedDemon, or you’re not using the FeedDemon 3.0 Beta, here’s what they look like (click to enlarge):

These are the kinds of features I want to focus much more on in FeedDemon. I want to eventually build a tool that automatically brings you the stuff that’s important to both you and the people you “follow” with as little effort from you as possible and without violating your privacy in the process.

In my mind the “RSS as email” approach has been dead for quite some time, and it’s been a while since I invested in email-like features. The real question is whether long-time users of RSS readers are ready to give up how they’re used to consuming their feeds (?).

ANN: FeedDemon 3.0 Beta 4 with Google Reader Synchronization

Published on April 30, 2009 by Nick Bradbury8 Comments

It has been fun watching the news spread about the latest FeedDemon 3.0 Beta even though I never “officially” announced it. It started with a couple tweets from me, then spread to Twitter at large and on to web sites like Digital Inspiration, Shooting at Bubbles and Lifehacker.

So, I guess I should make it official now: the first beta of FeedDemon 3.0 with Google Reader synchronization is now available from the FeedDemon Beta Site. If you're new to FeedDemon, you'll be given a choice between NewsGator and Google Reader synchronization at startup. If you're already synching with NewsGator, you can convert to Google Reader by selecting Tools | Synchronization Options | Advanced and clicking “Convert Now.”

Since this is a beta release, it comes with the usual “use at your own risk” warning. I try to make my beta releases very reliable, but there’s still a good chance you’ll encounter a hair-raising bug or two, so please don’t download this unless you’re comfortable using unfinished software.

I should also add that Google Reader synchronization is still a work in progress. I’ve been using it for several weeks and overall it has worked very well, but there are some missing pieces. In particular:

Tags you add in FeedDemon are synched with Google Reader, but tags you add in Google Reader won’t always sync back to FeedDemon.
If you convert from NewsGator synching to Google Reader synching, flags/tags you add to items that existed prior to the conversion may not sync with Google Reader.
If you have thousands of unread items in Google Reader, FeedDemon will not download them all. This isn’t actually a bug – I do this on purpose, primarily because I couldn’t justify consuming so much of someone else’s bandwidth to download items you’ll most likely never read. If you have a ton of old, unread items in Google Reader, I recommend selecting “Mark all Read” to be free of them :)

The first two issues are ones I’m actively working on, and my goal is to have them resolved prior to the final release of FeedDemon 3.0.

PS: If you follow me on Twitter, please understand that I can’t provide tech support on Twitter (I’ve tried, but it just doesn’t work). Our support forums are a much better place to report problems and ask questions!

Making Short URLs Suck Less

Published on April 4, 2009 by Nick Bradbury4 Comments

All this chatter about how short URLs suck makes me want to remind folks about FeedDemon 3.0’s “short URL preview,” which I blogged about a few months back.

As the screenshot below illustrates, just mouse over a short URL to see a balloon tip containing the actual URL it points to:

A even better example of this feature can be found in this excellent post from Digital Inspiration, which explains why FeedDemon 3.0 is “an almost perfect Twitter client.”

Anti-Virus Software Hates Us

Published on April 1, 2009 by Nick Bradbury16 Comments

One of the things I despise about Windows is how much time developers have to spend working around problems in third-party firewall and anti-virus software.

Case in point: I’m seeing quite a few error reports about the new FeedDemon 3.0 beta that are caused by AV software locking files that FeedDemon is trying to access. Many AV programs monitor the file system for changed files, and when they find one, they scan it for viruses – temporarily locking it in the process. This has always been a problem, but it’s now an even bigger problem since FeedDemon stores your feed content in a single SQLite database file. Every time that database file changes, your AV software scans it to make sure it’s not infected.

In some cases this causes file permission errors when FeedDemon tries to access its database, but more often than not it simply slows FeedDemon down since it has to wait for the file lock to be released.

Most people report that the new FeedDemon is a lot faster than previous versions, so if you’re finding it slower, chances are your AV software is the culprit.

The good news is that you can probably stop this from happening. FeedDemon’s database uses the file extension .FDB, so if your AV software has an “exclusions” list, try adding the file extension .FDB to it. If you can’t do that, see if you can add FeedDemon’s cache folder (File | Manage Cache) to its list of excluded folders. Several customers who have done this have reported dramatic speed increases.

Of course, I can’t expect every FeedDemon customer to do this, so I’m looking into ways to work around these issues. But in the meantime, give it a shot, and reply here if it makes a difference.

ANN: FeedDemon 3.0 Beta 1a

Published on March 31, 2009 by Nick Bradbury14 Comments

FeedDemon 3.0 Beta 1a (build 3.0.0.8) is now available. This is an update which corrects some issues reported in the initial beta release (build 3.0.0.7), which was posted on March 30 but not announced here.

Download details and release notes can be found on the FeedDemon Beta Site. As always, simply install this pre-release directly on top of your existing version – there's no need to uninstall first. If you encounter any problems with this beta, I hope you’ll stop by the FeedDemon 3.0 Beta Forum and let us know what’s going wrong.

Note: Google Reader integration is not in this beta, but we’re still hoping to get it in by the final release.

FeedDemon Beta Expiration?

Published on March 29, 2009 by Nick Bradbury12 Comments

If you’re using the latest FeedDemon beta release, it may be telling you that it expires later this week.

Don’t worry – there will be an updated beta available tomorrow (March 30), so the annoying expiration message will be short-lived. Sorry for not having a new build available before now, but I think you’ll be pleased once you see some of the new stuff:

As you can see from the screenshot, we’re moving straight to FeedDemon 3.0, which offers a shiny new UI and many highly-requested features. Feedback from private testers has been very positive, and I hope you’ll like the changes, too.

Note: Google Reader integration will not be in tomorrow’s beta. I’m still hoping to get it into this version, but we have some loose ends to tie up before that can happen (it’s a long story).

TopStyle 4.0 Beta 3

Published on March 13, 2009 by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

Yes, I know – things have been silent here for far too long! I’ll return to regular posting soon, but in the meantime, if you’re a TopStyle user you’ll definitely want to check out the latest TopStyle 4.0 beta from Stefan van As. Stefan has done some great work with the new TopStyle, so be sure to try it out if you haven’t yet.

PS: You can hear about all new TopStyle releases by subscribing to the TopStyle News RSS feed.

Daemon

Published on February 6, 2009 by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

I’ve been meaning to read Daemon ever since Rick Klau raved about it in his blog, but I always seemed to find a reason to put it off. Brad Feld’s review of it convinced me to finally pick it up, and now I wish I would’ve read it sooner.

What a great book!

It’s so nice to read a techno-thriller that doesn’t make me roll my eyes. If you’re a geek, you know what I mean: you start getting into a novel, and then suddenly find yourself laughing at the way technology is so cluelessly portrayed. Not so with Daemon – in fact, you may actually learn about tech that you didn’t even know already exists. And after reading the novel, I’m guessing you’ll never again leave your OS unpatched :)

Technology aside, Daemon is a great read with solid characters and a solid story. I recommend it highly.