Author: Nick Bradbury

Creator of HomeSite, TopStyle & FeedDemon for Windows, and Glassboard for Android. I'm a mobile developer at Automattic.

Did I Sell Out?

Published on by Nick Bradbury41 Comments

Every now and then I’ll receive a comment like this one from someone claiming that I “sold out” when I was acquired by NewsGator.

On the one hand, I’m a little flattered by these comments, because they mean that someone relies on my software enough to get pissed off at me. And I try not to take them too seriously, since accusations of “selling out” happen all over the place – for example, every time a rock band changes direction, they’re accused of selling out, regardless of whether that change was for artistic or purely financial reasons.

But it’s hard not to be insulted, and it’s especially stinging when someone suggests that I have “zero attachment” to my software. I’m personally attached to every application I’ve created – I sweated over each one for a long time, and feel personally responsible for every bug, missing feature, and usability problem in them. And to think that my reason for being acquired was just to make money ignores the fact that I was doing just fine financially by selling two fairly popular applications as a one-man show.

Of course, I can understand why TopStyle customers would think I sold out. After all, TopStyle has stagnated since I was acquired by NewsGator. My hope is that making TopStyle 3.5 – which includes some fairly significant new features – a free upgrade will serve in some small part as an apology for taking so long between releases.

Given that I’m a somewhat-independent developer, my reputation means everything to me, and my name would be tarnished – perhaps forever – if I really did sell out at the expense of my software and its customers. Are these accusations of my selling out limited to a few disgruntled customers, or do a lot of people believe that I sold out?

I’d honestly like to know, so please feel free to comment here.

ANN: TopStyle 3.5 Beta

Published on by Nick Bradbury11 Comments

I’m pleased to announce that TopStyle 3.5 – which will be a free upgrade for all 3.x customers – is now in beta. New features in v3.5 include:

If you’d like to give it a spin, stop by the TopStyle Beta Site for details. Of course, since this is a beta release, it comes with the usual warning that you shouldn’t download it unless you’re comfortable using unfinished software.

Link Blogs are Attention Streams

Published on by Nick Bradbury9 Comments

I’ve been writing about attention for quite a while now, ever since Steve Gillmor introduced me to the concept at Gnomedex 2004. Since then I’ve experimented with various ways to improve RSS aggregation by examining what you’re paying attention to, but I’ve rarely been satisfied with what I’ve come up with.

The basic problem with RSS aggregators is that once you subscribe to enough feeds, you’ve got too much information to keep up with. Sure, on a slow day you can read everything you’re subscribed to, but when you’re busy, you might just want to read the stuff that’s important to you.

This was the impetus for the popular topics feature in FeedDemon 2.5, which shows the most talked about items in your subscribed feeds. I know I rely on this “personal memetracker” feature a lot – when I’m nose down in the code and don’t have time to read my feeds, I just mark everything as read and then view FeedDemon’s popular topics to see the most commonly linked articles. Overall I’ve found this more effective than the various online memetrackers because it’s personalized with only the feeds that I’m subscribed to.

Lately I’ve noticed that my popular topics have been bringing me a ton of articles that are of interest to me, articles I might’ve missed if FeedDemon didn’t have this feature. And I’ve also noticed that the single biggest reason I’m getting so many interesting articles is because I’m subscribed to a number of link blogs.

If you’re not familiar with link blogs, they’re basically collections of articles that someone finds interesting. For example, FeedDemon 2.5 added the ability to share your favorite links as an RSS feed, and I have a link blog feed of my own. FeedDemon isn’t the only aggregator that offers this feature, either – NewsGator Online has had it for quite some time, and it’s also available in Google Reader.

Whenever I read something interesting, I copy it to my link blog. So my link blog is like my attention stream – it contains the stuff that I’m paying attention to.

And now that I’m subscribed to several link blogs, I can see what others are paying attention to. When an article appears in more than one of link blogs that I’m subscribed to, it shows up in FeedDemon’s popular topics. This consistently brings me new articles that I never would’ve found by myself.

That to me is the holy grail of “attention.” One of the main goals of the attention concept is to enable you to filter out the noise and just see the stuff that’s important to you, and I’m finding that FeedDemon’s popular topics combined with subscribing to link blogs is consistently doing just that.

I think there’s a lot more that can be done here – not just in FeedDemon, but in other aggregators as well. If you use an RSS aggregator, I believe you could really benefit from seeing the things that the people you pay attention to are paying the most attention to.

One Fish, Two Fish, Dead Fish, New Fish

Published on by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

Yesterday we had a funeral service for a goldfish that belonged to my six-year-old daughter Hannah.  She won it at a carnival recently, and it never really adapted to the non-carny life.  When we looked in the goldfish bowl yesterday, it was clear that her now-floating fishy had seen better days.

So I took her to a nearby pond, and we had a brief but touching ceremony which ended with her plopping the ex-fish into the water.  I asked her if she wanted to wish him well wherever he’s going, and she responded, “I wish he could go to Disney World and have a chance to ride all the rides.”

Not a bad thought, really.  After all, who wouldn’t want a quick spin through the Haunted Mansion after they pass away?

Guitar Hero II Ate My Weekend

Published on by Nick Bradbury9 Comments

Instead of going to Gnomedex this past weekend, I chose to stay home with my kids because today is their first day at a new school. So I had big plans for the weekend, plans that involved spending “quality time” with them making sure they were comfortable with going to a new school.

But then my son asked to play Guitar Hero II, which he received as a birthday present. And every plan went out the window. Holy crap, what an addictive game!

We’d already played all the way to the end when we got to try Freebird (on medium), so my son, my daughter and I spent the majority of the weekend re-playing our favorite songs. My daughter decided that Jane’s Addiction’s Stop was her favorite, while my son preferred YYZ and Pyschobilly Freakout. Me, I liked ’em all.

All I can say is, after a weekend of Guitar Hero II, I got blisters on my fingers. And I guess my kids are well prepared to enter the school of rock :)

My iTunes Widgets

Published on by Nick Bradbury1 Comment

Niall Kennedy has the news about Apple’s new My iTunes, which enables sharing your iTunes purchases, favorites and reviews as Flash-based widgets. This is a great move by Apple, although I do wish I could customize which purchases appear in the widget (for example, I’d like to exclude music I purchased for my wife, since her tastes are quite different than mine).

You can also subscribe to an Atom feed of your recent iTunes purchases – something I’ve wanted for quite a while.

Hot Enough to Boil an Entire Monkey

Published on by Nick Bradbury9 Comments

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I’m happy to report that as of 10am today, our air conditioning is finally working again.

But going two days and nights without air conditioning hasn’t been fun, especially given that temperatures have risen above 100 degrees this week.

I have to agree with Shelley Powers – I can’t imagine living without air conditioning, and I feel for those who do. I admit it: I am spoiled yuppie scum when it comes to staying cool. As critical as Internet access is to a techie like myself, I could live without connectivity longer than I could live without air conditioning.

Air conditioning is more important than Internet access – imagine that!

Hot Enough to Boil a Monkey’s Bum

Published on by Nick Bradbury4 Comments

Like much of the U.S., we’re experiencing a heat wave here in Nashville, and the 100-degree temperatures are expected to last throughout the week.

So it’s a bad time for my air conditioning to fail, which unfortunately it did yesterday.

My office, which is on the top level of my house, reached 98 degrees before I shut everything down last night.  I discovered that my computer misbehaves at that temperature, throwing up a nice assortment of BSoDs.  Needless to say, I’ll be working elsewhere until the air conditioning is fixed.

PS: Just in case you’re wondering, the title of this post comes from a Monty Python sketch.