Tag Archives: rss

Twitter favorites, now less valuable »

October 4th, 2012

Me, in July 2009:

So that is why I use Twitter’s favorite feature to help me save links for reading later.

For at least four years I’ve been subscribed to the RSS feed for my favorites on Twitter. That RSS feed is now gone. One of the features I found  most valuable on Twitter is now gone and I can not complain, send feedback, beg, nothing. It is simply gone.

This is painful. App.net and Tent.is are looking more and more viable. At least with them I’d be a paying customer and I could write in to complain.

How to tear down the walls of your echo chamber

August 22nd, 2012

Everyone has an echo chamber that they’ve unwittingly built up around them. Your interests, friends, environment, and location are all factors in determining what your experiences are, what you know, and what you don’t know. It can be limiting.

How can you tell if you’re in an echo chamber? Ask yourself; Is your experience and knowledge more diverse than it was five years ago? Do you know everything there is to know about a single topic such as Apple or Anime? Do you listen to podcasts, read the blogs of, and follow the tweets of the same few guys? Do you see the same headline (or worse, sponsor) more than four times a day? You get the point. You’ve built up a few walls around yourself and things are beginning to echo a bit.

Shake things up. Tear down the walls. Here’s how:

Travel. Don’t go on vacation and just visit the touristy areas. Sit, eat, chat, and work with the people of the area you travel to. Learn what it is that makes business, marketing, and sales thrive there. Come back with ways you can improve how you do business. (Visit the touristy areas too, though, and Instagram the crap out of them.)

Go to conferences and meet ups. No doubt you’ll hear new perspectives from the presenters but also be sure to intentionally speak to people who don’t do exactly what you do. Ask them questions about how they do business, what lessons they’ve learned, what skills they have, and what their favorite hobbies are.

Work next to someone different. Have you had the same job for more than a few years? That’s great. You should consider yourself fortunate. But you have to mix it up and you don’t have to quit to do it. Work at a coworking space or a cafe a few times a week. Sit next to someone different. Feel their energy when they’re getting stuff done. Teach them how you do things. Bring the lessons you learn from them back into your company. Everyone will benefit.

Periodically delete your RSS subscriptions. Or, perhaps, you use Twitter Lists now instead. Whatever the case, once-and-awhile go through and delete the sites that deliver news and opinion pieces. If you read someone’s opinion long enough their opinions begin to form your own. Break out of that habit. Read the counter arguments. Or ditch them altogether.

Take a break from what you already know and follow something brand-new. Do you know everything about the new iPhone being released next month? Do you have an App.net account? (So do I.) This is OK. It is good to know what’s new. But don’t forget to learn from the past or from something new. Something way out of your “wheelhouse”. What about following something super local but important like the growth of your community, the efforts to build new parks in your town, celebrate the centennial anniversary of a nearby bakery, or help a friend build a new business that you know nothing about? Take a break. Follow something new.

Watch 90% less television. That’s it.

Get offline at least one night a week. The Internet is awesome. But it will be awesome tomorrow, too. Get offline one night a week (meaning, from 5pm until you go to sleep don’t touch the Internet in anyway on computer, phone, TV, nothing) and do something you need to get done. Grocery shop, clean your house, repair something, play a board game with a friend, go to a museum, walk around your town and speak with your neighbors, plant a garden, cook a new recipe (twice). Remember; seeing something on-screen is much different than feeling it with your hands, smelling it, or tasting it. Get out there.

Our echo chambers won’t kill us. But they certainly limit our own perspective. And, in reality, our experiences are what make us different, valuable to a company, and fun to be around. Tear down the walls of your own echo chamber and see what else is out there.

Have more to add? Consider chiming in on Hacker News.

Reeder 3 for iPhone release (now supports Fever)

June 14th, 2012

The latest release of Reeder for iPhone has just hit the App Store. All sorts of goodies in this release – copiously described and illustrated by Shawn Blanc.

However, a big, big thing that most posts aren’t mentioning is that Reeder 3 for iPhone supports Shaun Inman’s Fever. Why is this a big, big thing? Because Google Reader could be scuttled at any moment by our friends in Mountain View, California. I’m not calling for that but they’ve added and removed features on a whim and they aren’t charging to use Google Reader so if they wanted to shut it down they could. Fever you have to pay for. Fever you install on your own. I trust Fever to be around far longer than Google Reader. And since I use Reeder on my iPhone, iPad and Mac – every single day – I would like that to stay that way. Looks like I’ll be buying Fever soon.

Goodbye chronological. Hello realtime. Sad face.

December 2nd, 2011

In the good old days of the web I was able to subscribe to any site and receive updates via my feed reader for every post that the site made in the order that they were published. Even though RSS feeds typically only held a finite number of items in them the feed reader I used would typically cache all unread items so that I could always catch up later.

In short; I never missed a post.

In some ways, those days are going away and now I’m at the mercy of the realtime web and an algorithm. And so far I don’t think I like it.

On Twitter, from what I can tell, I have access to about 7 days worth of tweets in their official clients; web, mobile, and apps on the iPhone and iPad. Tweetbot, a third-party Twitter client for iPhone, only pulls in the latest 50 messages in my Timeline and also on Lists that I’ve created. If I haven’t checked Twitter via Tweetbot in more than 50 tweets I simply miss those tweets.

Some people do use Twitter just to see, as Twitter puts it, “What’s happening now”. And, of course, that is extremely valuable. The pulse of the planet. But I use Twitter to keep up with family, friends, a few interesting people, a couple of companies, and yes – even a few celebrities. But I want to see every tweet. Not just the most recent few.

On Facebook the News Feed is run by some algorithm (which I shall now refer to as “secret sauce”). This secret sauce is both pretty bad and pretty nebulous. It is pretty bad because I’m routinely missing posts that I probably would have cared about. Case in point, my brother asked me the other day if I had seen a video he put on Facebook. “Nope, never saw it.”, I replied. I have my brother marked as a family member on Facebook. Surely Facebook’s secret sauce would deem a post by him as something I would like to show up in my News Feed? Apparently it didn’t. It is pretty nebulous because apart from some controls on the News Feed about the types of items I would rather not see, there really aren’t many controls for this secret sauce recipe thingy.

I realize I’m probably in the minority but I prefer to have access to every single update from the blogs that I subscribe to, Twitter accounts that I follow, or people on Facebook that I friend. I wouldn’t have decided to make those connections if I didn’t care to see them all. I’m going to miss the good old days.

Lookwork

November 8th, 2011

Lookwork is a very interesting take on a RSS reader.

It is a little too Tumblr-esque for me. By that I mean that it is a very passive way to browse a ton of entries without ever slowing down and viewing each photo or post by itself for any length of time. It is one of the reasons I believe that engagement on Tumblr is so poor. It is just too easy to browse too much content too quickly. If you don’t allow someone to see something, on its own, long enough to think about it, chances are they won’t and they’ll just keep going.

But, new ideas should be applauded. And RSS deserves many, many more people and companies thinking differently about it. So, kudos to Eric Jacobsen.

Reeder for Mac hits the App Store

June 10th, 2011

I just did something I’ve been waiting months to do. I purchased Reeder for Mac from the App Store.

It isn’t very often that I am so anxious to pay for something that I have been using for free. In fact, I can’t remember any other application that I’ve wanted to purchase more than Reeder for Mac. For months I’ve been using Reeder for Mac’s “beta” builds and they have progressed steadily and swiftly from a pretty good application to an indispensable one. Its workflows are so well refined that it allows me to accomplish a task that – at one point in my life – used to take hours and hours of my time each day. With Reeder for Mac I’m able to keep up-to-date with everything going on in my world in only minutes per day instead of hours. I’m able to use the same workflows no matter which device I happen to currently be on because I use Reeder on my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone. In fact, I simply can not imagine owning a Mac, iPad or iPhone without having Reeder installed.

I suppose I’ve wanted to pay for the application for so long because I’ve wanted to put my money where my mouth was and to finally pay tribute to those that have worked so hard on it. To provide them with the resources they need to keep the application in existence and, dare I say, improve it. I’m really looking forward to the future of these applications.

So, I guess it goes without saying that I recommend you pick up Reeder for Mac too. Oh, and for iPad. Oh, and for iPhone. You’ll thank me later.

 

Teach a friend about RSS

January 26th, 2011

For the last few years I’ve been hearing chatter that RSS “is dead”, yet, I still continue to use it every single day. So, I thought – lets turn this crap on its head. Lets bring RSS “back” by teaching at least one friend how to use it.

Why?

The vast majority of people that surf the Internet on a daily basis are going to but a few sites. They wake up in the morning, check Facebook, Twitter, CNN, and perhaps one or two other sites – turn on the TV, check those sites again, do some household chores, check those sites again, and so on. Its absurd. They are so silo-ed they don’t even realize what they’re missing.

There are hundreds of millions of websites. If these same people were to check say, a few hundred websites per day, they’d be able to get little else done. Who wants to visit a few hundred URLs on a daily basis just to see what’s new?

Well, that is where we geeks who know about RSS come in and help out. We teach them RSS to save them time and to expand their web horizon.

How?

There is absolutely no need to teach them the RSS spec or how it works. They only need to know how to use it.

So, how do you use RSS? First, you get a Google Reader account or the app of your choice for your platform be it PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. All of these platforms have fairly good RSS readers and if you’re a geek you already know about them. I chose Google Reader because a) many people have a Gmail account and so those account credentials already work, b) Google Reader syncs with a lot of applications should they ever mature to using an app.

Side note: I use Reeder on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Love!

Last night I taught my wife Eliza how to use RSS. She complained to me that she “only visits a few different websites” (which is what spurned this post) and within 5 minutes we had her an account on Google Reader with a few RSS feeds “subscribed”.

By the way, Google Reader makes subscribing to websites pretty easy. Just copy and paste the website URL in to the “Add Subscription” box. No need to know the RSS feed URL (for most sites). This makes the learning curve not-so-steep.

So, pass this on. Find someone that you think could benefit, as you no doubt have, from using RSS on a daily basis – sit down with them and teach them the ropes. RSS isn’t dead, we just don’t talk about it enough anymore.

Oh, and you can feel free to subscribe them to my blog’s feed or The Watercolor Gallery’s feed and I’d be fine with that. :)

Twitter, Facebook and soon the world!

May 21st, 2010

OK, maybe not the world. But, this is simply a friendly housekeeping / reminder post to let you know how easy it is to keep up with the latest posts from this here site. In order of my recommendation:

If you follow my personal Twitter account, @cdevroe, you will only get linked to mobile photos and posts that I feel are worthy of tweeting about. Oh, and my smooth wit and charm too.

Joining the drum line for Realtime RSS

January 1st, 2010

I remember when I first learned about RSS. At the time my personal Web site was running on some homegrown content management system that I built myself using ASP. So I was tasked, unlike many people today, with creating my own feeds. I had to learn what feeds did and why they were beneficial, read the RSS spec, and create my own script to create the feeds for my site.

Today, of course, having a Web site that can syndicate its content, activity, or media through an RSS feed is easier than ever. Using just about any content management system to power your site will most assuredly include all of the proper feeds by default.

Once again, however, times are changing. Even though consuming RSS feeds in a feed reader never made the mainstream (in my opinion if my Mom doesn’t consume feeds than it never hit mainstream) the popularity of such services as Facebook, and Twitter have. These platforms have helped the thought of finding things real time much more mainstream. Want to know what people think about Avatar or who just saw it, look it up on Twitter. You can even do a Google search and find the very latest things related to Avatar on Web.

But can RSS keep up? Most feed readers consume feeds on command or at some kind of interval (say, every thirty minutes). But what if you wanted the very latest updates to show up as they happen? What if you wanted to keep up with your subscriptions real time? Well, with the help of RSS cloud you can. RSS cloud is a “pingable” service that helps bring RSS aggregation into real time. You can read more about how it works on the site.

RSS has always proved itself to be incredibly flexible. It evolved when blogging began. It evolved when the need to distribute media, such as audio and video, came into popular demand. And it is evolving again to become a little more real time friendly.

And, just as I trumpted the importance of RSS when I first learned the spec myself, as Dave Winer requests – I’m joining the drum line for Realtime RSS. I’ve installed the RSS cloud WordPress plugin here on First initial, last name so that its RSS feed now includes everything it needs to be real time compatible.

I suggest you do the same. And by that I mean, learn why it is smart to make your feed compatible and make the necessary adjustments to your feeds no matter what you use to manage your site.

Addendum: Jason in the comments mentions that Pubsubhubbub is the RSS/Atom extension and service to bring your feeds onto the real time Web. He mentioned that RSS Cloud itself, although supported by the millions and millions of WordPress.com blogs, hasn’t really gained near as much traction as Pubsubhubbub. So, until I do a bit more research I’ve installed the Pubsubhubbub WordPress plugin.

RSS to Twitter using PHP

December 6th, 2009

Update January 19, 2010: This script is now available on GitHub. Go forth and fork.

Today I noticed that my now ancient PHP script to update Twitter automatically using PHP/cron needed to be updated. It turns out that Twitter stopped recognizing URLs with ? in them as clickable links. Here is an example tweet where you’ll notice this happening.

I could have told Twitter and asked that they update the way they handle URLs but in reality my script was old, slow, too long, and shouldn’t include ? anyway so I figured I’d write a new one from scratch that included my short URL scheme.

So, here is the PHP script to parse an RSS feed and send the posts to Twitter. It includes a caching mechanism so that you won’t have duplicate URLs posted to Twitter. If you want it, take it. However, if you are better than I am at PHP (most 6yr. olds are better than I am at programming) then I ask that you fork the script on Gist and try to improve it.

Update Dec. 6 @ 5:34p: Kyle Slattery, follow Viddler team member, loves him some Ruby on Rails. As such he’s offered up this version of the script rewritten in Ruby.

Next up we have Anthony Sterling, self-proclaimed “PHP addict”, who has rewritten the script to make the configuration a bit easier. He also changed the way the cache is saved. He’s using a hashed version of the title for each post as his key. I do not believe this to be the best way to go, since post titles can easily change after publishing – but I do like that the script is about 20 lines shorter and the code is arguably cleaner.

Thanks to both Kyle and Anthony for their versions. Lets keep this going and see if we can get this script much more succinct, stable, faster, and usable by others?

The pseudo Twitter follow through FriendFeed

June 11th, 2008

This is a simple tip on how to “follow” someone on Twitter without actually “following” them.  On Twitter I only follow a select few people.  This helps to cut down on the noise and keep me relatively productive.

However, there are some Twitter accounts that I’d like to follow, but not “follow”.  Take for instance the Twitter account for a local newspaper in my area The Times Tribune (timestribune on Twitter).  The Times Tribune’s web site sucks, since it doesn’t even have RSS feeds to subscribe to, yet they manage to syndicate their news to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr. Go figure.

Anyway, long story short.  I don’t follow them on Twitter.  I created an “imaginary friend” on FriendFeed ((Unfortunately, and I’m not sure why, FriendFeed does not allow me to share my imaginary friends with you. I’m hoping that in the future FriendFeed enables the sharing of one’s imaginary friends)) using their Twitter account and the RSS feed for their group on Flickr.  Now I get news updates delivered to me through Twhirl.

Just incase I miss something on Twhirl (since I don’t watch it 24/7), I’ve also subscribed to the feed that FriendFeed generates for this imaginary friend.

I told you it was a simple tip.

Are feeds really like a time machine?

November 1st, 2007

I was watching my friend Robert Scoble’s show where he was getting a demo of the latest version of Bloglines from the General Manager of the service, Eric Engleman. When Mr. Engleman was asked how he describes feeds to those who are yet unaware of them and he replied:

“They are like a time machine…”

Do me a favor and watch Robert’s show (you can watch it on his blog post without downloading anything) so that you can see that statement in clear context.

We all struggle to create simple definitions for complex technologies, but time machine? He makes a good point, in that feeds can really save people a lot of time, because they save the need to actually load every single site the person wants to read on a daily basis. But everything  that I know tells me that when you try to define something, it should be clear, concise, and not leave anything to mystery, or the need of further definition.

Pick up any dictionary and look at the definition of a word. Pick one, there are tons of them. Every definition offered for each word in that book leaves no question as to the meaning of the word. Even fairly complex words that have meanings rooted in history so far back that some of the origins have already been forgotten – yet someone has taken the time to come up with a succinct way of stating exactly what that words means. Sometimes, a word means different things – perhaps even to different people – and so the dictionary offers nearly all of those as well.

So what about feeds? What is a good way to describe feeds to those yet unaware of them?

How would I know? Two years ago (almost to the day) I gave a really horrible definition to what feeds are that I, for no reason whatsoever, called the unified feed theory:

“A “feed” is a way of syndicating almost any type of content (be it articles, essays, plain or rich text, images, audio, or video) in a simple and portable way. Feeds are generally used to distribute frequently updated content, such as news and notifications. An example of this would be CNNs feeds, which provide headline feeds on various topics to keep their readers up-to-date with news. To take advantage of any feed on the Internet, you will need a “Feed reader” or a Web site service that is capable of reading these feeds. These feed readers appear very much like an email application, in essence you’re being ‘emailed’ every time one of your “subscriptions” update their content. Many people who have many Web sites they visit regularly, use feeds to be notified of these updates rather than visiting hundreds of Web sites each day.”

I’m amazed I even added punctuation! But, live and learn, right? So as I heard Mr. Engleman say “time machine” I thought about how, two years later, I’d describe feeds to someone. I think I’d say something utterly simple like:

“Feeds are kinda like email. When a web site is updated you’re notified of the change without needing to visit the site.”

This description does not describe how feeds work, that you’ll need an aggregator, or even give an example use really – it is straight forward and is built upon knowledge that most people already have. If someone wants to know more, maybe they’ll do a little research or ask for more information. But I think it portrays the idea pretty easily. While my crude definition from late-2005 is accurate, it is a pain to read and long winded.

Two years from now I’m sure that I’ll be able to describe feeds even more succinctly. But I look forward more to the day when feeds no longer have a learning curve at all, sort of like email. You sign up to an ISP and you’re given an email address and a, well – maybe a Bloglines account.

Hey, Mr. Engleman – ever think about getting every single person that logs onto the Internet to use feeds the moment they connect to the Internet by automatically setting up their accounts for them? Something to think about. Kill the learning curve by setting it up for them.

Re: The usefulness of Microformats

December 4th, 2006

Kyle Kneath recently wrote I just don’t get this whole Microformats thing and I wanted to take a minute to respond to him.

Kyle is doubting the usefulness of Microformats, and is also saying that he thinks the learning curve is too hard because of the documentation making things “too hard”. First I’ll address his comments on the documentation being much too difficult to follow:

“Maybe it’s just me — but I feel like the microformats crew are actively trying to make this an elitest club. I’m not very stupid (I don’t think) but when I first started researching microformats it took me ages to really understand it. It turned out to be dead simple.

You can see the documentation (featured to the right) is quite brief for simple formats like hCard. Wait a second… are you serious? This page is reeee-diculously (and needlessly) long and really needs to be cleaned up. It’s like a giant newbie-scaring-machine. hCard is dead simple to implement; a couple of paragraphs should suffice with two or three examples.”

I could not agree more with Kyle on this. The documentation for Microformats, in reality, is all spec information. There is a definitive need for someone with any type of documentation experience to get on the Microformats Wiki and really make some “Microformats for Dummies” type of documentation.

Someone on Kyle’s comments suggested just getting Jeremy Keith to spear-head the effort. Well, Jeremy is already a microformats “evangelist”, but I can see their point. He has the ability to make things that seem difficult, dead simple. Perhaps he could take some time to edit the heck out of the wiki and/or just add a series of pages explaining each Microformat in human language.

Onto Kyle’s other gripe; the usefulness of Microformats. I disagree with Kyle on this point. Microformats can be, will be, and already are extremely useful. I feel a little weird saying this since I have yet to really take full advantage of Microformats on my site here – but it is definitely in my plans. Kyle didn’t really expound on his reasons why he thinks Microformats are not useful until one of the very last comments that he wrote (he doesn’t have permalinks on his comments so I will copy it here):

“But… again, you seem to have proved my own point with “We haven’t figure out how exactly that will help us” — that’s my entire point. I’ve been following microformats since Tantek was talking about them years ago. An yeah, Tantek is a cool dude… but is it enough of a reason to use them?

I honestly haven’t found it.

I use web standards because it helps me work faster produce more maintainable code and standardize my practices. I can’t say the same for microformats. The best I could say is: “I use microformats so that the extreme minority of my browsers, who have an extension installed, who are looking for specific metadata, who have scripts installed to interact with their other data management applications can more easily add me to their address book.”

Oh, and for those pushing hAtom… the last thing we need in this world is more syndication formats :) ”

His argument here is really way off. When he says “we haven’t found ways” he really means himself. I think if you ask the folks at Technorati, and the people that have invested millions of dollars into them, they’d disagree with Kyle too. Microformats is just really starting to take off (if people do not use them, they are indeed useless but as more people use them, companies like Technorati can really build useful tools). There is no one definite useage for each Microformat, however each have their own implementation. The biggest advantage I see? One content delivery system for almost any type of data. I don’t need to create a vCard for my about page, I just need to add a few classes to the information that is already there. This brings me to his second point that falls short.

His argument that “…and for those pushing hAtom… the last thing we need in this world is more syndication formats”. Perhaps he hasn’t delved into hAtom much, but it isn’t another syndication format, it literally takes the place of Atom (which is becoming increasingly popular and is starting to become the syndication format of choice of some of the larger companies that have tons of data to syndicate [ see Nail Kennedy's article about feed syndication formats and their usage]). Also something to remember is the hAtom is currently in draft format, but imagine if if you had a blog and you didn’t need to serve an HTML version, RSS 0.92, RSS 2, and Atom version of your site. You could just serve the HTML version and all of the data you wish to syndicate – to different applications and services, could be parsed from that single delivery system. This is the biggest advantage of Microformats in my opinion.

The documentation does need a serious look, and update, to make it a much less steep learning curve. Broader usage will come of that, and in turn more uses will reveal themselves from a growing user base. I suppose Kyle’s post really cuts right down to the root of the Microformats problem – explain them better, and they’ll be used.

[tags]microformats, kyle neath, tantek Çelik, jeremy keith, hcard, hatom, rss, atom, feeds, syndication, technorati, html[/tags]
[slug]re-microformats-useful[/slug]

Leopard wish list – Part two: Mail

November 13th, 2006

I’m not as much of a power-user of Mail as I probably could be. There are features of Mail that I simply do not use, and therefore my request for Mail are rather light. However, I do feel that some of my requests make sense, so hopefully they will be included in Leopard.

Fixes

Here are some things that I believe should be fixed in Mail.

Smart Mailbox rules are seemingly complete – though I find one oddity among them. When you select the “Message is in Mailbox” filter, you are presented with every Mailbox you’ve setup – even the Smart Mailboxes that you’ve already created. However, if you select the “Message is not in Mailbox” filter, you are not given the Smart Mailboxes as options. I’ve thought about this for awhile, and I still can’t figure out the reason.

The search box should allow for multiple filters such as you find in the current Finder. Searching for a subject, then being able to click + to drill down until you find what you are looking for. I have about 12,500 pieces of email, and finding the 1 that I am looking for can sometimes prove difficult with a single search filter.

The address book panel seems very OS 9-ish. It works, but I’d like to see the design of this updated a bit.

Feature requests

I realize that Mail is getting “a significant upgrade” when Leopard is release, though the major feature additions looked atrocious in my opinion. Here are some things I’d like to see.

The iLife Media Browser would be an awesome addition to Mail’s default set of icons on the New Mail window. Attaching photos from your iPhoto Library is quick and easy – if you already have iPhoto open. I envision a time where we can click on the Media Browser (similar to what you find in Pages, iMove, etc) and find a photo or photos and attach them with ease.

Side note: The new version of Mail will have “stationary” – and from what I can tell from the screenshots released so far there is a new button called “Photo Browser” at the top. I hope that this is not a brand-new, non-standard media browser that does not use the same frameworks that are used throughout the system so far. And, I hope that this button is not only enabled when you choose a particular style of stationary that allows for photos. We need this feature to be available any time we want to send normal attachments.

An all new way to attach files would be nice. Utilizing a media browser to attached photos, audio, and perhaps even video – would be nice. But I can see definite improvements that could be made to attaching documents, spreadsheets, and compressed archives too.

Imagine you need to attach an Excel spreadsheet, a PDF document, and a .Zip file full of product images to an email. When you do this, I would like to see a preview of the document that I am going to attach. (This does currently work with PDFs and Images) I’d like to see previews for Excel spreadsheets, Text files, Rich-Text Files, Word Documents, .Pages documents, Keynote Presentations, and anything else that usually resides in the document window.

As per .Zip archive files, it’d be nice to select a zip file in the “attach file” panel and be able to see the file names of the files within the archive. This would ensure that I’ve selected the correct file to attach.

Automatic compression of multiple file attachments is something that was “introduced” by AOL back in the mid to late 90s. I have not used America Online since then, so I have no idea if this feature still exists.

If I had an email with multiple attachments, as described above, Mail could automatically compress those files on send. This way, the transmission of data would be slightly smaller. On the other end, Mail.app would uncompress those files into their original state prior to displaying the message to the recipient.

Side note: The biggest problem with this feature in AOL (circa version 2 or 3) was that when you sent email to anyone that was not an AOL user, they’d just get a .zip file. Back in those days .zip files were not yet the norm, and so you had to have people go to winzip.com or something to download a utility to uncompress those files. In other words, their email client did not have the “automatically uncompress files upon receipt” feature. Annoying to say the least.

The other problem with this is, Mail would have to have a slightly proprietary compression format so that when a .zip, .tar, .bz (etc) type of file would come in, it wouldn’t always uncompress those files. If I was sent 1,000 text files in a .zip archive, I wouldn’t want those files automatically uncompressed by Mail.

Final thoughts

I’m trying not to be too picky, otherwise this list would get quite long. Any application that is used as often as an email client always gets more than it’s share of scrutiny. I’m fairly happy with my email client to-date, and I hope that the trend continues.

Side note: Leopard Mail will include Stationary, Notes, To-Dos, and RSS feed reading ability. From what I’ve seen so far, I do not “like” any of them (even though what I did see would be considered BETA).

The Stationary seems a bit superfluous though I can see people having a ball using them. The Notes doesn’t make sense to me yet simply because I do not email myself notes. There are hundreds of ways to “take notes” on the Mac OS ranging from widgets to small menu bar applications to full-blown GTD applications. The “to-dos” in Mail seem like they’d be better kept and updated within iCal. I’m sure the integration between iCal and Mail will be might tighter this time around – so I’ll have to see that integration prior to passing judgement.

RSS within Mail is a completely new headache to me. RSS feeds within Safari is only made for those people who keep track of a few web sites. With constant attention to feed management you may even be able to get away with having 100 subscriptions in Safari without pulling your hair out. Unless the integration of RSS feeds (which should be called “Feeds” but we’ve already talked about that), rivals that of NetNewsWire, then I see no improvement than using Safari for your subscriptions. Too much synergy may not be a good thing in this case.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

  1. Part one: Safari
  2. Part two: Mail
  3. Part three: iChat
  4. Part three: Finder

[tags]apple, macintosh, mac os x, osx, mail.app, mail, iphoto, ilife, safari, leopard, mac os 10.5, wish list, ical, gtd, stationary, notes, to-dos, rss[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt2-mail[/slug]

Leopard wish list – Part one: Safari

November 10th, 2006

I fully realize that my “wish list” that I will be publishing is coming a little late to be included in the Spring-time update to the Mac OS – however it is good to note that much of what I am documenting has already been sent to Apple months ago.

The first thing I’m going to tackle is Safari (though I believe that Safari should be updated as a separate application and not part of the OS). I’ll try to focus my thoughts from fixes, to actual bugs, to feature requests.

Fixes

The following are not “bugs” in the traditional sense. I believe that most of the following was done intentionally, I just do not think they should have been done.

Setting your default browser is currently held within Safari’s preference panel. This “feature” definitely gets on the nerves of many and really I can’t figure out why this resides in here. In order to switch from Safari to Firefox you’d need to first open Safari and tell it you want Firefox to be the default browser.

This isn’t to say that Firefox (and other browsers) do not ask if you’d like to use them as the default browser on your system – but this does not mean that this is the proper location for this preference. What if I uninstalled Safari?

The blue RSS button at the top of the browser is fairly misleading. Apple is attempting to “brand” a doc-spec. In other words, they are saying that all “feeds” are RSS. Obviously this is not true. I do not want that icon to change from RSS to ATOM to “WHATEVER” when it applies, I’d much rather see Apple use the unified feed icons to go along with the unified feed theory (another post I have to bring over to my local site soon).

Multiple feeds detection kinda goes along with the above. I suppose this could be filed under a new feature request – but I feel like they might have kept it simple on purpose. I wouldn’t mind seeing a short list pop up with the available feeds for that site. Obviously this would only be useful if web masters actually listed these feeds in their documents.

Feature requests

Safari is definitely a browser for the average user, but I’d like to see a few of the “not so elementary” features from other browsers find their way into the Leopard release of Safari. Why? Because I’d much rather use Safari than Firefox if it only had the following.

Photo description

Bookmark keywords (click to zoom)

Bookmark keywords is something I use heavily in Firefox. I am not sure how widely used this feature actually is, since even browsers like Flock do not currently have this feature built in (and Flock is built off of the same engine and core as Firefox). Side note: I’ve been told that Flock 1.0 (due out sooner than later) will have these features as it will be built off of the Firefox 2.0 release.

To explain really quick, for those that are not familiar with this feature – Bookmark keywords allow you to setup shortcuts for your bookmarks. Let’s say that you had a rather long URL that you visited often, and you didn’t want to traverse your long list of bookmarks in order to get to that page without typing in the name manually, you can setup a shorter keyword for that. (see screenshot) You type in that keyword, and poof, you’re there.

Searchable history is not something I use every day, but when you need it – you find it very handy. I suppose I could liken a searchable history to Spotlight. Before Spotlight was introduced we never knew how much of a pain it was to find things on our local system. But, after having Spotlight for awhile now, I find it indispensable. Such is the case with searchable history. Safari’s history menu is crude – and needs a significant update.

Update: As Nathan pointed out the history in Safari is indeed searchable. But I would have never found it if he hadn’t told me where it was. So the UI needs to be adjusted to make this much more accessible.

Final thoughts

Really my requests for Safari are very light and don’t hold a ton of water when it comes to my decision to use Firefox instead of Safari. There are other, underlying, reasons why I use Firefox that are much more “under the hood” type of reasons. For instance, many WYSIWYG editors inside of various web applications do not function properly within Safari. Hopefully, with the very latest version of Web kit no doubt being included in the upcoming release of Safari, we’ll see some of this functionality made available.

I remember the first day I wanted to jump ship from Safari to Firefox. I wanted to use Google Calendar and couldn’t because Safari was not a supported browser. But now that I rarely use any online web applications – I may switch back and deal with my little niggles mentioned above until they become available (hopefully) in the next release.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

  1. Part one: Safari
  2. Part two: Mail
  3. Part three: iChat
  4. Part three: Finder

[tags]leopard, mac os x, osx, macintosh, apple, safari, wish list, browsers, flock, firefox, bookmarks, history, rss, feeds, atom[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt1-safari[/slug]