Category: Web/Tech

Random thoughts from MIX06 Day One

Published on by Nick Bradbury6 Comments

I’m at MIX06 this week, and I’ve left behind a full inbox which I’ll tackle when I return (so apologies if you’re waiting for an email from me). The conference is in Las Vegas, which means I’m far too sleep-deprived for a coherent post, so I’ll just toss out some random comments:

  • I have to be honest and say that this morning’s keynote from Bill Gates started off as the same old robotic marketing pitch we’re used to hearing from Microsoft. Things improved considerably, though, when Tim O’Reilly did a “live” interview of Gates. You could tell Gates was far more engaged than he was during the marketing spiel – it’s fair to say his personality showed through, and that was a welcome change. We need more of this from Microsoft.
  • The live demo of Atlas, Microsoft’s AJAX framework, received quite a bit of applause. It looks to me like they’ve done a nice job hiding the complexities of cross-browser/cross-platform AJAX from Microsoft developers.
  • Dean Hachamovitch gave a preview of IE7’s RSS features (among other things), and several people around me were visibly impressed with IE7’s handling of Microsoft’s Simple List Extensions (SLE). It is very cool, but it left me wondering how I’d handle displaying multiple feeds (such as a folder of feeds) when each feed has its own set of filters and/or sorting criteria. Regardless, I agree with Charlie Wood that RSS aggregators will need to support SLE if they hope to remain competitive.
  • After spotting Marc Canter in the crowd, I wondered at what point we’d hear his voice boom out when nobody was expecting it. I didn’t have to wait long – at the end of the MySpace presentation, Marc called out for them to create an open API (a point he echoed during the brief Q&A session). I know I’ve got RSS blinders on, but given MySpace’s content, it seems to me that they could really open things up through a more aggressive use of RSS and (especially) MediaRSS.
  • The demos of WPF by the BBC and Fluid received many well-deserved oohs and ahhs. After watching those demos, I immediately stopped being jealous of the cool UI gadgets that Mac OS X developers get to play with (sorry, Brent!).

NewsGator’s Hosted RSS Platform

Published on by Nick Bradbury2 Comments

Just noticed that we’ve officially announced our NewsGator Hosted Solution (NGHS), which enables publishers to quickly and easily create web-based RSS solutions. I got a sneak peak at NGHS several weeks ago, and I was impressed with it. Techie that I am, I especially liked the tag-based language which enables defining the layout of various RSS components (it sort of reminded me of ColdFusion in its combination of power and simplicity).

Feedback on IE7 Beta 2 from the Developer of FeedDemon

Published on by Nick Bradbury3 Comments

As most readers probably know by now, the second beta of Internet Explorer 7 is out, and it offers some nice improvements such as tabbed browsing and feed reading. I’m far too biased to comment on the actual feed reading experience in IE7, but I would like to make some unrelated comments for the IE7 team.

First off, I’m sure I’ll get questions from people wondering when FeedDemon will support the new Feeds API, but right now I’m afraid I don’t have a definitive answer for them. If I was just starting out with FeedDemon, I’d be happy to support it and avoid writing all the ugly code to handle feed downloading, caching, parsing, etc. But since I’ve already coded that, supporting the API requires a lot of extra work, so there’s less incentive to support it right away.

More importantly, I haven’t seen any statement about what Microsoft plans to do with the user’s feed (attention) data, and I can’t give customer data to Microsoft without some idea of how this data will be used. For the record, I don’t mean to suggest that they have “nefarious plans” here – it’s just that if an application is supposed to hand the user’s data over to Microsoft, some reassurance that this data won’t be misused is necessary.

Also, I’m concerned about how the feed API appears to let any application access the user’s feeds. I realize this is a beta and the documentation isn’t complete, but I do hope that there will be a way for the user to keep certain feeds private to specific applications. Related to this, how are secure feeds handled? Can any application read the user’s password-protected feeds, or is there some mechanism in place to protect against that?

Last point about the feeds API: I’m really glad to see that the raw XML of each feed can be accessed, but I’m not sure whether applications can store extra metadata in each feed. Is this possible, or does FeedDemon need to store this metadata somewhere else once it supports the API? I’d prefer that it be stored within the actual cached feed, so that different applications could read each other’s metadata.

OK, now that that’s out of the way, here’s a smattering of other feedback regarding IE7 Beta 2:

  • The WebBrowser Control should provide an event that tells the host application that the user chose to subscribe to a feed. It’s easy enough to hack around this, but it would be nice if hacking wasn’t necessary. It would also be nice if there was some notification when a feed is detected in the current page (see next comment).
  • The user has the option to have IE7 play a sound when a feed is detected in the current page, and this sound still plays when IE7 is hosted in another application (and even when FEATURE_DISABLE_NAVIGATION_SOUNDS has been enabled). FeedDemon offers this same auto-discovery feature, and it automatically excludes feeds that the user is already subscribed to. So it’s confusing when the embedded IE7 plays this sound in FeedDemon for a feed that the user is already subscribed to.
  • IE7 says the MIME type for some feeds is “XML Feed Document,” and other feeds are just “XML Document.” It would be better if this was consistent.
  • I love the way the WebBrowser control now differentiates between when the user opened a link in new window and when they opened a link in a new tab. It took less than a minute for me to adjust FeedDemon to support the new “Open in New Tab” context menu item.
  • I wanted to use the IE7 beta a few days before commenting on the UI changes, since I realize the immediate reaction to change is usually negative. Overall I like how the toolbutton overload is managed, and the space above the page being browsed is more wisely used than in previous versions. But while I have nothing against blue boobs, I do find the placement of the navigation buttons awkward. The navigation buttons act on the page you’re browsing, so I’d really prefer them to be closer to the browser page instead of off in the top left of the window. This is especially annoying when the “Favorites Center” is showing, since the buttons are even further away from the page. FWIW, in FeedDemon, I found it useful to place the toolbar below the tab so there’s less mouse movement required (screenshot).
  • I’m glad to see that IE7 supports both import and export of OPML.
  • I’m not wild about the use of the word “synching” to refer to feed retrieval. This isn’t synchronization – it’s scheduled downloading. (Disclaimer: part of my motivation here is to avoid any confusion with the type of synchronization that NewsGator offers).
  • I’d like to see a “Favorites” toolbutton that displays your favorites in a dropdown menu.
  • I never would’ve guessed that Dean likes the Spice Girls :)

Return to Technorati

Published on by Nick Bradbury7 Comments

A couple of months ago I dropped Technorati in favor of Google Blog Search for uncovering links to my blog. I wasn’t happy with Technorati’s performance, and I figured Google would do a better job finding new links given their resources.

Well, I was wrong. Truth is, I’ve been disappointed in Google’s blog search – Technorati does a better job overall, especially now that they’ve addressed their performance problems. So, I’ve switched back to Technorati. Nice work, folks :)

Are You Paying Attention to Google?

Published on by Nick Bradbury13 Comments

A year ago the subject of attention wasn’t getting much, well, attention. But that has been gradually changing, due in part to the efforts of AttentionTrust.org (disclosure: I’m on the AttentionTrust board, although I write this post as an individual), and also due to the growing realization that big players such as Google are benefiting from data that you generate for them.

In a previous post I described how companies such as Netflix benefit from your “attention data” (that is, information about what you’re paying attention to) by recommending products based on what you’ve already purchased. That seems pretty obvious, but it may not be so obvious as to why a company like Google would want this information.

In Google’s case, I think they’re facing problems due to clickfraud, splogs and link spam in general. While Google certainly employs ways to protect page rank from link spam, it’s an uphill battle, and it’s got to be something that their advertisers are (or soon will be) concerned about.

For this and other reasons, what Google really needs to know is what people are actually paying attention to – not just what they’re searching for, but also what they’re clicking on and reading. This is where something like their Web Accelerator comes in handy, since it passes your page requests through Google’s servers, giving them a way to find out where attention is being paid.

In general, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with this as long as there’s no deception about what’s going on (and Google does make it clear that traffic is passed through them). But I also believe that you need to seriously consider whether you’re being fairly compensated for what you’re giving up.

Does Google’s Web Accelerator benefit you enough to give them your attention data? In my case the answer is no, but I’d be willing to trade my attention data for free wireless access in my home town. Of course, your answer may vary depending not only on how valuable the compensation is, but also on whether you agree with the way aggregated attention data is being used.

The other thing you need to be concerned about is whether you can get your own attention data back. This is where most of the current crop of attention gatherers fail the test, since few of them provide any way for you to get the data they’ve collected in a way that enables you to use it outside their service. I’m not cynical enough to attribute this solely to greed, though – it may be because they don’t personally identify the data they collect, or that they haven’t considered giving back this data simply because very few people have asked for it.

If you’d like to persuade more companies to share this data with you, then I hope you’ll consider joining AttentionTrust.org. The more people we have on board, the easier it will be to convince attention gatherers to not only give you access to information they’ve collected about you, but also to provide fair compensation for it.

Guest Post from Brent Simmons: What Can I Learn from You?

Published on by Nick Bradbury8 Comments

Hi! I’m Brent Simmons — NetNewsWire developer and Nick’s co-worker at NewsGator.

Just the other day, in private conversation with a few Mac developers, I called FeedDemon an honorary Mac application. I didn’t have to spell it out, they knew what I meant: that it’s not just usable and aesthetically pleasing, it’s fun to use.

I have a little experience with Windows, even with Windows development — but that was a few years ago. I have a new Dell laptop, and my total time in front of Windows XP so far is just a few hours. A big part of that, I hate to say, was configuring the wireless networking. (Is it actually difficult, or was it just my being unfamiliar with Windows?)

Here’s the thing about Windows: the successful apps are, almost by definition, doing lots of things very well. On Windows I haven’t seen as much of the raw glamour that some Mac apps exude, but then my recent experience is limited — and glamour can get in the way, can be as much a barrier to usability as a good thing.

What FeedDemon showed me is that what I personally look for — apps that delight users — exist on Windows.

But Windows is still largely unknown territory for me. I’m sure there is more to learn from FeedDemon, other Windows apps, from Windows users, and especially from people who use Windows and Macs regularly. So, some questions:

If you’re a FeedDemon user, what features should be added to NetNewsWire?

Are there aspects of Windows UI design that should be applied to Mac apps?

What are the best things about Windows apps that Mac apps lack? And what are the worst things, things that Mac apps should avoid?

What are the cool things about the Windows user community?

Thanks, folks!

PS: Here’s Nick’s guest post in my blog.

Chris Pirillo’s Gada.be

Published on by Nick Bradbury9 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Chris Pirillo letting me know about a new metasearch service he devised called Gada.be. I wasn’t able to try it out because I was recuperating from surgery at the time, but today I took it for a test spin and I was immediately won over by its OPML support.

Why? Well, instead of subscribing to a dozen individual search feeds, I can import a single OPML file which links to them all. For example, the OPML below links to 16 different search feeds for the keyword FeedDemon:

http://feeddemon.gada.be/opml

I’m not a big user of mobile devices (call me a Luddite, but when I’m away from I desk I want to forget all about technology), but if I was I’d also love how Gada.be simplifies keyboard entry of queries from cell phones and other handheld gadgets.

For details, check out Chris’s blog for his announcement of Gada.be’s public beta.

World-wide “Thanks to the Delphi R&D, QA, and Doc Teams” Day

Published on by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

Nick Hodges suggests that Delphi programmers thank those responsible for creating such a great development tool, and I’ll certainly join in. Although I dabble in other languages, Delphi remains my tool of choice for building desktop apps. I used Delphi to create HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon, and I owe a great deal of thanks to the folks who developed the powerful programming environment that made my work possible.