Category: Uncategorized

Earlier this year, the Google folks announced a change to how applications like FeedDemon should authenticate with Reader.  Later this week, the old authentication system will be dropped.

FeedDemon has used the new authentication method ever since version 3.1.0.20, which was released several months ago.  If you’re using an older version, you’ll want to update to the latest version right away – otherwise, synchronization may no longer work for you.

PS: Sorry for the prolonged silence here – my family is in the middle of a move which turned out to be far more complicated than we planned!

Stop by Shooting at Bubbles today if you'd like to read Steven Hodson's wide-ranging interview with me about FeedDemon, social media, my status as an indie developer, the supposed death of RSS, and a variety of other topics.

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.

I was weaned on Mad magazine, and with the possible exception of Don Martin, Al Jaffee was my favorite Mad cartoonist.  This piece on Al Jaffee in the NY Times was a nice reminder of my Mad-infected youth – especially since it was accompanied by an excellent Flash-based collection of Jaffee fold-ins.

I’ll be the guest geek on today’s “Delphi Hour” show.  If you’re a Delphi developer (or even if you’re not) and you’d like to tune in, Nick Hodges has the details.

I know it has been quieter than usual around here, and there’s a good reason for that: I’ve been coding like a madman on FeedDemon 2.5.

FeedDemon 2.5 – which will be free to all existing FeedDemon customers – has actually been in beta for several weeks, but I haven’t mentioned it here yet in order to keep the number of testers small. Today saw the release of FeedDemon 2.5 Beta 4, so I figure it’s time to let it loose.

As you can see from the release notes, there are a lot of additions in FeedDemon 2.5, including these new features:

• Synchronize a FeedDemon news bin and expose it as an RSS feed that anyone can subscribe to (for example, my link blog feed is created by drag-and-dropping feed items and web pages into a FeedDemon 2.5 news bin)
• Vastly improved offline support, including the ability to prefetch links and images in unread items for offline reading
• Completely rewritten “Popular Topics” personal memetracker (screenshot) which includes the most popular topics in everyone’s subscriptions (as described in the FeedBurner blog)
• Embedded videos now display inside FeedDemon’s newspaper
• “Who’s linking here” – quickly find out which sites are linking to an item in any feed

If you’d like to give the beta a spin, stop by the FeedDemon Beta Site to get it.

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Note: Although I try to make my beta versions as solid as possible, they inevitably contain a few bugs. If you’re not comfortable using unfinished software, please wait until the final release before downloading FeedDemon 2.5.

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If you’ve been waiting to buy any of NewsGator’s products (including FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, NetNewsWire and NewsGator Go!), now would be a good time to stop waiting.  Why?  Because if you enter the promo code NGHoliday in our shopping cart this month, you’ll get $10 off any product purchase.

Steve Gillmor has been on a tear lately, gesturing like a lucid madman as he writes some of his most coherent posts in ages. For example:

• To be continued
• Critical Mass
• iPlodius III
• and especially No Prisoners

Welcome back, Steve. Oh, and more Beatles’ allusions, please.

Okay, it’s time for a minor rant about a pet peeve of mine: I hate it when politicians talk about “average Americans,” as though people who don’t aspire to a career in politics are somehow “average.” How many people do you know that like to be referred to as “average?”

This practice afflicts the tech world, too. For example, while I agree wholeheartedly with this post by Scott Karp, the talk of “average people” made me grind my teeth. How about we use the phrase “non-geeks” (or “non-technical people”) when referring to people whose lives don’t revolve around their computers? That seems less condescending to me.

I’m spending a few days in Denver this week to visit my friends and co-workers at NewsGator, which is something I should do more often. I’ll be here again on August 18 – which as luck would have it is when the Red Hot Chili Peppers (one of my favorite bands) play in Denver.

At the company’s “all hands” meeting this morning I suggested that a bunch of us go to the concert together, and asked for a show of hands of those who wanted to go. A surprising number of hands popped up – and they all popped up after NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston said that the company would pay for the show.

I’m working for a company that’s paying for everyone to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I may never leave this place :)