Why I don’t like Bloglines

Why I don’t like Bloglines

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There is much to like about Bloglines.  Those that use it know what they are.
But I keep running into the limitations of a web based aggregator:

1. Selecting a story to save by clicking the checkbox causes a refresh of the left "tree-control" pane.  When I want to check several in a row there is a noticeable delay that slows me down.

2. I like the ability to save stories; and marking all stories as read automatically CAN be nice but most of the time it is inconvenient.  I often don’t stay on top of my feeds so folders often accumulate with 100+ stories.  Once I select a folder, the pressure is on for me to read those stories lest I click away from that folder and lose the concept of "unread".  I can’t do other things like edit my feed list until I finish reading the posts in the open folder.

3. It doesn’t support feeds requiring authentication

4. To edit your list feeds you have to select "Edit" to go into edit mode.  This view looks very similar to the "browsing" view so when I’m done I try to click a feed to display it’s items.  It just seems to ignore me.  I often forget I have to go back into "browser" mode by selecting the "My Feeds" tab again.

Developing for the Mac

Developing for the Mac

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Cocoa
The Cocoa environment
provides an advanced, object-oriented API for Mac OS X that makes it
easy to create complex applications using very little code. The secret
is in the power of the Cocoa frameworks themselves: they provide
enormous amounts of useful functionality out of the box so that
developers can focus on writing the code that’s specific to the domain
of their application.

Carbon
The Carbon environment
provides fine-grained procedural APIs in C and C++ that are intended
for developers who are migrating applications from classic Mac OS to
Mac OS X. Carbon applications can run on Mac OS 9 as well as Mac OS X,
making Carbon a logical choice for those developers whose applications
need to run on both systems.

Cross Platform
For cross-platform desktop application development, Apple supports two environments:

The
principle cross-platform API on Mac OS X is Java 2, Standard Edition.
Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" provides both Java 1.3 and Java 1.4.2
integrated into the system. (Java 1.5 is also available as a developer
download; see the ADC Java
page for more information.) In addition, Apple provides the full JDK
for both Java 1.3 and 1.4.2, as well as implementations of Java 3D and
Java Advanced Imaging for JDK 1.4. Most existing Java applications run
well on Mac OS X without any modification, but some developers like to
take advantage of the unique integration that Apple provides with Java
in Mac OS X to make the user experience close to that of a native Mac
OS X application.

If you need for your application to run
on Linux or a UNIX platform other than Mac OS X, you may wish to take
advantage of Apple’s highly-optimized X11 implementation. Apple
provides a full X11 SDK as an optional install with the Xcode Tools.

XCode
Apple even provides the advanced Xcode Tools software development
environment free of charge with every copy of Mac OS X so that you can
start building great applications as soon as you get your Mac.

Xcode 2.1 is Apple’s tool suite
and integrated development environment (IDE) for creating
Mac OS X Universal Binaries that run natively on PowerPC and Intel-based Macintosh computers.
The IDE provides a powerful user interface to many industry-standard
and open-source tools, including GCC, javac, jikes, and GDB. Xcode is
designed to fully support the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks and Java.
It contains templates for creating applications, frameworks,
libraries, plug-ins, Java applications and applets, and command-line
tools. Developers can use Xcode to construct a user interface, test
code performance, and perform many other common development tasks.
For the latest Xcode release information and other details, see the
Xcode Updates page.

Mark Cuban on Podcasting

Mark Cuban on Podcasting

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Mark doesn’t buy the Podcasting hype.  He’s not knocking podcasting per se, he just doesn’t believe people should plan to make money as podcasters.  He equates it to streaming radio.  I like this comment he made:

Repurposing industry
  specific information from tradeshows, speeches, product presentations for employee or customer education or as sales
  support. No brainer. These are just extensions of existing content into a new low cost medium.

That’s where my interest primarily lies.  I hope NPR starts making their content avaliable via downloads.  MSNBC has.

Grokster vs MGM

Grokster vs MGM

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Mark comments on the impact of MGM winning this suit.
He posts:

This is from a contract for an investment that I was looking at.  It was a very smart move to ask
  for this protection and i have every intention of stealing it and using it in any digital asset acquisition I
  undertake in the future.

 Digital Millennium
  Copyright Act Compliance…

 
 

Free weblog Service comparison

Free weblog Service comparison

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Blogger

Pros

  • Supports team blogging.
  • Blogger is the only service that support Universal XML-RPC Weblog Interface that allows third party clients like w.bloggar to add/edit/delete posts.
  • Can publish to your own site via FTP.
  • Categories supported via Labels.  Each  label has own feed 

Cons

  • Categories are NOT supported.
  • Posting images is a bit tedious.
  • Does not support podcasting. Feedburner can be used to add enclosure tags to your podcasts.
  • Feed in ATOM format only
  • No support for  separate pages 


WordPress

Pros

  • Categories
  • Supports Pages

Cons

  • No  FTP

MSN Spaces

Pros

  • Offers various
    degrees of privacy ranging from only allowing you, or selected people,
    to see your blog, all the way up to "public" — meaning anyone can see
    the blog.
  • Offers Lists of URLs

Cons

  • Does not support podcasting
  • Can not publish to your own site