SimplePie Shutting Down.

jake on 2009.09.28 at 08:59 am

Hopefully the open source project will live on in some form. Along with my personal site I just used SimplePie (along with Yahoo! Pipes) to add photos to a blog I keep with some old friends.

So effective immediately, we are ceasing development of SimplePie and shutting down the project. We will shortly be pushing all code to GitHub. The mailing list will continue to serve users for the time being, but my sincerest hope is that someone will take up the charge to fork SimplePie, fix all of its issues, and continue on with this project that’s been such a huge part of my life for the past 5 years.

SimplePie is ceasing development

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Hot Tip: Things

brian on 2009.02.09 at 10:06 am

If you’re a user of Cultured Code’s Things, the GTD-like organization software for the Mac (with companion iPhone app) you’re really going to like this tip I just found:

• Open one of your to-dos so that notes section is exposed.

• Drag a file that’s related to that to-do to the notes column.

• See a really helpful hyperlink (alias) to the file appear in the notes area.

• Optional: rejoice.

Very happy about this. Something I had missed from when I used OmniOutliner for my to-do lists.

If you’re using and syncing with the iPhone version of the application, the file name will come up as just text in the notes field. Also, if you go to edit the notes field on the iPhone, the title of the file will simply become “LINK 1” so you have reference that it was a file name, not just text.

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The Next NetNewsWire Loves Twitter

brian on 2007.05.14 at 09:56 pm

The next revision of NetNewsWire will sport a feature to send a link to Twitterific.

It will also support text resizing (long a complaint of mine) and microformats! Hooray for old-school usability and new school web2point0hishness.

Posted in: Software · Web · Standards

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PicLens Plugin for Safari

brian on 2006.12.17 at 07:09 pm

PicLens Plugin for Safari = Awesome.

Essentially brings the iPhoto 6 Full Screen mode (sans editing, of course) to Safari. For certain sites, listed on the plugin’s webpage, you can click a link that appears when you hover over an image and be instantly in full screen, image-only mode. If you put the mouse towards the center, the top and bottom bar glide off screen and you can navigate entirely with the arrow keys.

Recommended. Apparently free. Apparently responds to Apple Remote input (I didn’t test this). In beta (of course.) A version for Firefox is apparently in the works.

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Photoshop and FlickrBooth

brian on 2006.12.16 at 07:45 am

FlickrBooth is cool. Yup. That about sums it up.

Adobe Photoshop CS 3 is now in public beta, and if you didn’t hear about that, you can head over to Adobe Labs and enter your CS 2 serial number to download a free copy of the beta to use until it goes gold. They’re also visually branding PhotoShop as “Ps,” and it comes with Adobe Bridge, which is likewise labeled “Br.”

I’d suggest watching this MacWorld video about the Ps beta. The first half is a little slow but the Ps product manager does give a good run down of the new features. The second half is an actual screen cast showing off a few of the new features, which are pretty impressive.

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More Features are the Only Way Forward?

brian on 2006.12.12 at 04:45 pm

Joel Spolsky says:

With six years of experience running my own software company I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features. Nothing.

Joel, have you ever released a new version of software without adding new features? Perhaps concentrating on speed increases? Interface optimizations? Bug fixes. Reduction of steps in a wizard, even? How about less junk on my plate, and just junk that works better? Makes me more efficient, allows me to go home an hour early to see my wife and puppy?

I have a feeling you don’t have a control group to test your hypothesis on. How can you say it can’t work? Of course, it is your company.

Get me home earlier and I’ll spend my IT budget on your software. Well if it wasn’t Windows-only.

[ hat tip: Josh. ]

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Google Talk and MSN via Jabber together in iChat

brian on 2006.09.27 at 06:55 pm

macosxhints.com – Google Talk and MSN via Jabber together in iChat

Wow, awesome hint from MacOSXHints.com about how to chat with MSN users via iChat. I’m marking it here for later use. Author also seems to allude to the fact that you may be able to use a similar technique to chat with Yahoo! chatters, as well.

If you’ve already established a Google Talk account and have it set up in iChat, you can add non-Google Talk users to your contact list… You can also add an MSN gateway to your Google Talk account, but you’ll need the help of a more complete Jabber client such as PSI.

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XCast is slick

brian on 2006.08.31 at 10:18 pm

Even if you’re not interested in a new Podcasting client (downloader) for your Mac, you should at least watch this screencast of XCast. It’s an attractive, well-designed and seemingly intelligent app yes, but the screencast is simply one of the best I’ve seen a developer give of his own app. Bonus points for the foreign accent!

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BumpTop 3D interface

brian on 2006.06.24 at 02:31 pm

A lot of people are talking about an interface experiment called BumpTop

I viewed the YouTube video (after the QuickTime torrent and standard QuickTime download both proved broken) and was thouroughly impressed. Some great ideas here.

However, I must also add that I won’t give my GUI up for it anytime soon. It simply doesn’t have enough context. The little icons only have file types… who cares if I can actually pick up and throw files… if I don’t know what they are. Given some context, this would be really cool.

Downfall number two: this would have to be used in a situation where you don’t need to type much, since it’s pen-driven. I could see how it could be adapted to a mouse/trackpad, however.

last comment: my computer is much more thoroughly organized than my physical life, and this is because of the 2D restraints placed upon my actions there. Why would I want to go 3D and be able to make a mess? Of course, every day I see many people who make a mess in the 2D world too, so perhaps this is an arbitrary note.

You can find more info at their website.

Posted in: Technology · Software

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Blogging from Flock 0.7

brian on 2006.06.15 at 12:06 am

I read a blog entry today, Introducing Flock Beta 1 which, oddly, translates to Flock 0.7.

Flock was unveiled last year to much fanfare, finally a browser that got the “Web 2.0.”

That was all well and good, until the beta showed there was much work to be done, much promise to be fulfilled.

See how Brian fared with Flock beta 1 by reading on… (this post was written from within Flock)

Read More

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Ode to NNW 2.1

brian on 2006.03.02 at 09:01 pm

I just wanted to give a shout out to the one application I probably could no longer live happily without… NetNewsWire.

I don’t know much about other news readers, since NewsFire stopped being free, and about a day with the Google News reader (eh) I haven’t touched another reader. What’s more, I have zero desire for another reader. I liked it so much I bought it. At the time I was only using the lite version, which is still free, but i wanted to send some money to Brent to encourage his development efforts. I took the pro app, and come version 2, I was sure glad I had it… the syncing of news is invaluable. And version 2 was free for purchasers of version 1. That impressed me.

But then, today I read this…

(version 2.1 is) a free upgrade. In fact, existing NetNewsWire users will get two years of free upgrades plus a free subscription to NewsGator.

Damn. Thanks Brent. Again.

He says it’s mainly going to be a maintenance release, plus NewsGator syncing… but he claims the speed is increasing. This is great, because my only qualms came from the crankiness of the syncing… and the lack of speed. I figured it was due to my over-use of the program… over 300 feeds, lots of tabs… but he’s testing with a private tester’s 634 tabs. Alright!

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Search Folder for flagged in Thunderbird

jake on 2006.01.26 at 10:48 am

Disclaimer.

I should preface this short tutorial explaining that this is for older versions of Mozilla Thunderbird. Think of it as an alternative to the abilities added in version 1.5.

Some background.

I’ve been using Thunderbird at work for a long while now. I grabbed Thunderbird way back when it was in beta.

I also have a problem with keeping my email organized. I get various messages on a weekly basis asking me to update minor things on various web sites. And if I’m currently busy with an unrelated project they quickly move off the screen and disappear from sight and from memory.

There are two methods for highlighting messages in Thunderbird called labels and flags. Labels give color in the message window and their titles can be customized. They are easily applied using the keys 1-5. Flags can be inserted as a column and clicked to turn them on and off. There are of course other methods for applying the two.

Read More

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Playing with Footnotes and Javascript

jake on 2005.12.04 at 09:23 pm

A while ago lots of people were talking about footnotes and subsequently sidenotes on the web. There were lots of different opinions.

John Gruber and Richard Rutter defended the idea that using built in HTML anchors is a perfectly acceptable method of creating footnotes. Joe Clark responded that not only are they not actually footnotes and that nothing exists to represent footnotes. Joe also was frustrated that John was getting heaps of praise for pointing out a fairly obvious solution to the problem. I’d say it wasn’t exactly obvious, it felt more like a brain teaser where when you see the solution you smack yourself on the forehead and go, “ohhhhhh, now I get it.”

I had a little experience with the sidenote idea back when I was in college. I had a project in English where I created pop-ups with Javascript to show off the explanations my partner created for the project. It was a little messy and not semantic at all but it got the job done for 1999.

I decided to play with the idea a little bit. I came up with a couple variations in my head to use Javascript to snazzy up the end result. The first variation uses a script to sift through the footnotes at the bottom of the page and when you mouseover the superscripted numbers you get a tooltip with the footnote. And it degrades nicely into a list similar to Gruber’s. Just try turning off Javascript.

I’ve tested it in many browsers and the only problem I’ve found is that in Opera the tooltip can fall off the edge of the screen. I plan on cleaning it up, but let me know if you see anything I can do to fix it up but still keep it as simple as possible. I also hope to turn it into a full on Behavioral style script.

So for now you’ll just have to live with the thrown together code. ;)

Playing with Footnotes

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Explorer Destroyer

brian on 2005.11.10 at 05:03 pm

The authors of this blog wish to bring to your attention:

Explorer Destroyer

Heehee. And don’t miss its sister site, Kill Bill’s Browser. which is a checklist of the best reasons (in their opinion) to leave IE. I laughed out loud at reason number eight.

We will not be employing any draconian devices to entice our readers to not use Internet Explorer. We support the use of any web standards compliant browsers, especially ones derived from open source projects.

Personally I spend most of my time in Safari, with the rest of my time split between Camino (for you Windows users, that’s a Mac-only derivative of Firefox) and Firefox. I usually use the original Firefox when viewing image-intesive websites so i can use its Linky extension. I also use the Web Developer’s Extension toolbar for design and development.

So if you haven’t got the gist yet, and you use Internet Explorer… get a clue.

And tabs!!

Posted in: Technology · Software · Web · Standards

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Free Opera (not music) Today only.

brian on 2005.08.30 at 09:35 am

Happy Birthday to the folks at Opera, the Norwegian web browser company. As thier present to us, we can register the full, ad-free version of the Opera web browser at no cost. (It’s usually $30)

Go here to get more information and download Opera for free.

This offer is valid from 12 a.m. Tuesday, August 30 to 12 a.m. Wednesday, August 31 2005 (PDT).

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It's an OS X Planet

brian on 2004.12.21 at 09:37 pm

Today I was turned on to a wonderful application called OS X Planet, thanks to a MacUpdate search looking in to EarthBrowser. I was considering dropping some cash for EarthBrowser (I believe paying for shareware beings good karma, and more shareware, and new economic models), but, damn, although certainly less feature-rich that EB, OS X Planet does everything I wanted, for free. Impressive.

Note to EB developers, I probably wouldn't have even looked for another app if their app didn't cripple the demo mode with low res pictures.

And to everyone else, happy planet browsing.

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So Long Audion

brian on 2004.11.11 at 09:17 pm

So Panic, one of my favorite software companies have posted the life story of their ground-breaking MP3 player Audio for the Mac in honor of its retirement.

Sad for me a little, since Audion was the first piece of Mac shareware I ever bought. I more paid for the software to support Panic, a great company. When I had a question, the owner wrote me back directly. That's when I decided to pay up for something I could have used for free. Soon after, I also invested in Transmit, which is a staple of our web development.

Read the story, if not just to hear the funny, interesting stories, and to see what type of company we here look forward to being one day.

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Happy Birthday

brian on 2004.11.09 at 10:55 am

Happy Birthday to FireFox 1.0, which goes live today. Of course, their site is an absolute mob scene right now, so good luck downloading it today. BitTorrent anyone?

Coincidentally, this coincides with my 26th. I feel special.

What am I doing on my birthday? Working. A closing shift.

What am I getting for my birthday? Amanda is getting me a new Timbuk2 courier bag. For those of you who don't personally know me, I like cycling bags, so I am all smiles over this.

Additionally, I'm considering getting a G5 tower to act as my home server and a central backup solution. All my drives are full. I can get a good price on a single processor 1.8, and I am debating making the plunge. This could be fun.

Posted in: Technology · Software · Standards

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Irish Language to be added to Microsoft Products

jake on 2004.06.18 at 02:40 pm

Irish is one of two languages I hope to learn some day, the other is French. Microsoft is working with a couple universities from Ireland to translate Windows XP and the Office Suite over to Irish. I doubt that I will ever be able to run my OS in anything other than English but I'm glad to see this happen.

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New Zelda game shown at E3

jake on 2004.05.12 at 03:13 pm

I'm defintely getting too old for this, I hardly ever play games any more. But I just can't help but link to a trailer from a new Zelda game. Unlike the first Wind Waker, where everything was cel-shaded and looked like a cartoon, Link is looking more mature. Too bad this won't be out for a while.

Posted in: Software

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RSS Readers ruining it for the rest?

jake on 2004.04.30 at 10:27 am

Wired.com has an article about how RSS could overwhelm the Internet's pipes. At frist I was frustrated cause it sounded one sided but they touched on the problems by the end.

Mark Fletcher, chief executive of Bloglines, said he agrees that many desktop readers are broken.

"Several clients default to polling every half hour, which on a per-user basis ends up generating a lot more traffic than if the user was just going to the website himself," he said. "A user generally doesn't go to the same website every 30 minutes looking for changes."

That's exactly what I did at work. My boss noticed my reader was polling regulalry (even though it really wasn't that much) so he had me change it to every 2 hours for every feed I subscribe to. And as far as I know the 2 apps that I can't decide between only download if there are changes. (At home I use NetNewsWire).

If everyone followed rules of etiquette and the readers were forced to not allow anything less than an hour between checks then it would help a lot with these problems. Mostly I think it's the check for changes thing though. Not the frequency of checks (within reason).

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Mozilla Mechandise Coming Soon!

brian on 2003.10.21 at 01:08 am

Support la resistance starting 23 October by buying Mozilla merchandise! I'll certainly be there, will you? 'Zilla branded-trucker hats, anyone?

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They Can't See the Big Picture

brian on 2003.08.15 at 09:52 pm

Large organizations make poor decisions due to layers of people who can't see the big picture. Or who look out for themselves first, the organization second. Along these lines I present an article from Robert X. Cringely (a pen name, I believe), which talks about why IT departments avoid Macintosh (job security) and why large software companies are outsourcing coding to India (short-sighted cost calculations). Beancounters are rarely visionaries.

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Diablo 3 Item Generator

jake on 2003.07.25 at 03:01 pm

In the vain of the Castlevania Name Generator there is a Diablo item generator. Some of the names are amusing.

Posted in: Software

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Reasons to switch to Mozilla Firebird

jake on 2003.04.30 at 04:11 pm

Blogzilla provides a link to an article describing many of the nifty features the browser provides. Of course with the name change and waiting for a new version to be released, Blogzilla points out, it might not be the right time to send this article off to Grandma.

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Doom III article

jake on 2003.04.16 at 03:27 pm

I've been waiting to post this since I got my issue of Wired a couple weeks ago. They have an interesting article on the development of Doom III and the man in charge John Carmack. It's actually more about Carmack, and they discuss Doom III.

Since then[releasing Commander Keen], Carmack has written a new graphics engine for almost every product he's developed. In an essentially visual medium, the graphics engine - the core code that determines how images are displayed on the screen - is the brain of any game. And with each new engine, Carmack's achieved a higher level of immersion and realism. He's a hero among coders for particularly elegant programming that pushes the limits of hardware.

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Phoenix and Minotaur have new names.

jake on 2003.04.15 at 03:05 pm

Blogzilla posted that Phoenix and Minotaur have new names. (from mozillaZine)

They are Firebird and Thunderbird respectively. I'm not sure where they got these. Personally I really liked Minotaur. I wish they went along the same line of naming. Even just renaming Phoenix to Mozilla would have been fine by me.

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Mac using IAs rejoice!

brian on 2003.04.15 at 11:00 am

Yes, folks, the number one requested feature for Mac-using IAs has arrived: the new OmniGraffle 3.0 Pro released today, imports Visio: "Import and export Microsoft Visio® XML files seamlessly with OmniGraffle Professional."

Rejoice!

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Safari's All New

brian on 2003.04.15 at 12:35 am

Apple Safari 1.0 (Beta 2) is out today, which is great for this weblog. Why? Because it makes our website pleasant on the eyes once again. For the longest time, Safari botched our standards-compliant layout, due to a bug in its KHTML layout engine, dubbed "WebCore" by Apple. Now, it's mostly fixed. Safari also rolled out the much awaited tabbed browsing feature. Now if only Safari implements tabbed page controls like Camino, where URLs send from other applications are opened in new tabs in one window, I will be in browser heaven.

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MySQL progressing towards powerhouse

jake on 2003.04.11 at 04:45 pm

CNET has an article about the first ever users conference for MySQL. It highlighted the road plan for the future. Including version 5 which will be aimed towards the buisiness sector.

The company also is promising a concerted push into the enterprise market with MySQL 5.0, which will build on some of the features in 4.1.

This site is run on MySQL and I'm glad to see they're trying to take on the Oracle's of the world. I was also tickled by the reference to the projects mascot.

And it wouldn't be an open-source gathering without a mascot. Sakila the dolphin was plastered on T-shirts, bags and notepads throughout the conference hall. MySQL's Axmark said the company chose the dolphin because it's fast, clever and good looking. "They also group up to kill sharks," he said.

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Adobe Acrobat 6

jake on 2003.04.11 at 02:27 pm

creativepro has a look at some of the new things in Adobe Acrobat 6. The article was written by Planet PDF. If your curious about it's significance...

In our opinion, Adobe's new flagship product Acrobat 6 is the most significant release since version 1.0 came out almost 10 years ago. Whilst at the time of writing this piece there are still a few loose ends left to take care of, for the most part we view this release as being truly groundbreaking. Unlike the release of Acrobat 5.0, which in comparison with 6.0 was a fairly minor update, we are much more bullish about the benefits that Acrobat 6.0 is going to bring to its potential customers and users.

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Mozilla gets a trim.

jake on 2003.04.03 at 11:11 am

The Mozilla Group has announced that Mozilla will now be based on Pheonix, a stand alone browser and Minotaur, a stand alone email app. This is mostly to reduce the bloated, slow current Mozilla with a fast and small version.

Isn't that what they said they were doing in the beginning? Gecko is small and fast, what they put around it is slow and clunky. Hopefully Pheonix won't become the same way. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

At least this is aimed towards providing a group of apps. I never liked how the Browser, Mail, Composer, etc. were all hooked together. Sure they are right there for use, but I don't want a crash in Mail to bring down the browser.

Notes from Blogzilla
mozillaZine Article
CNET Response

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