David Emery OnlineFeed Readers
As many regular readers will know, feed reading is a fairly avid pastime of mine. For those of you that don’t know, a feed – commonly a RSS feed – is representation of a website that, when used in a feed reader lets you be notified when a website’s content changes (so you don’t need to keep checking yourself).
Like most people first coming to RSS I started out reading a handful of feeds in a desktop feed reader – NetNewsWire, to be precise. This worked out OK to start with, but the more feeds I added I quickly ran into two major problems: Firstly, checking for updates took a fairly significant amount of processor (I was using a 867Mhz Powerbook at the time) and also quite a lot of time.
Secondly, half of the feed reading process for me is opening a news item in a browser to see it on the original site, normal to check out whether there have been any comments made. NetNewsWire actually caters for this by having a built in browser – based on WebKit, the engine behind Safari – but the more I relied on RSS for my news consumption, the more I found I...
Read more ➔Friday Links XXVIII
Stand Me Up; Turn Me On – I do love simple but nifty ideas.
Pantone’s Missed Chance – I’d truly love decent cross-platform accurate colour support on the web. Ah well…
Replystreams: The Next Step for Lifestreams – I love the idea of this in concept, but how is it going to avoid being spammed to death?
CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing – the lack of font choices on the web is I think the biggest limitation of CSS at the moment.
Welcome to the new Boing Boing! – The redesign is so-so (it’s not exactly exciting) but the addition of comments is both long overdue and very welcome.
Fans urged to boycott Winehouse – I fail to see why her record company has any responsibility in this, any more then anyone else’s employer would have any responsibility.
My Copyright Left Me – it’s been rather obvious for quite a long time that the availability of something for free somewhere does not prevent lots of people paying money for it as well.
Design Decisions: Highrise import – I firmly believe in trying to figure out the easiest, simplest thing to do and doing that first; most...
Read more ➔Reading Festival 2007: Sunday
Right – time for the last in the series of my reviews of Reading Festival 2007. Sunday, while traditionally thought of as the ‘rock’ day didn’t actually seem to contain a huge amount of what I would call rock, the main stage filled with whinny emo instead…
12:00 Radio 1 Stage: Late of the Pier
I almost didn’t manage to drag myself out of bed for Late of the Pier – I don’t envy anyone playing early on Sunday – but they were certainly worth it. They’re my pick of the current flock of unsigned bands getting hype at the moment, blending electro influences with more traditional rock and indie. ‘Heartbeat, Flicker, Line’, probably their best song, is definitely worth hunting down.
12:55 Carling Stage: I Was A Cub Scout
“Fuck the headliner!”...
Read more ➔Reading Festival 2007: Saturday
Right, on to day two of my Reading Festival 2007 roundup! The theme of the day was most definitely ‘indie dance’:
12:00 Dance Stage: The Teenagers
I quite like The Teenagers on record, but their performance at Reading was disappointing. The songs just sounded slightly pathetic, with no substance, and in all honesty I felt slightly embarrassed at times. Hopefully they were just having an off day – I’ll have to catch them again soon to make a definitive conclusion.
13:30 Dance Stage: Does It Offend You, Yeah?
Now this is more like it! I’d only heard one track by Does It Offend You, Yeah? – which is receiving heavy rotation on Zane Lowe’s Radio 1 show at the moment – but they seem to have much more in their arsenal. Live, they were exactly what I want from an indie dance band ( don’t call it nu-rave ) – loud, chaotic and full of fun.
Reading Festival 2007: Friday
Welcome to the first of 3 posts reviewing this years Reading Festival. I had a great time – and saw really quite a few great bands – and, as is seemingly common for me these days, took lots of pictures. 1121 pictures, to be precise, which in retrospect seems slightly excessive.
Anyway – on to the bands! Here’s a quick roundup of Friday, which probably turned out to be the weakest day line-up-wise but was still goof fun:
12:50 Radio 1 Stage: The Sounds
I’ll be honest: The Sounds were a fairly uninspiring start to the weekends festivities. Their uninspiring generic indie was pretty dull, and they weren’t helped by the pretty poor sound quality that would plague the Radio 1 Stage the entire weekend.
13:35 Main Stage: The Long Blondes
Second band in and we’re getting slightly better – but only slightly. The Long Blondes have a couple of ok songs, I’ll grant you, but they just don’t manage to work on such a large stage. Also, I’ve never been able to shake the feeling...
Read more ➔Friday Links XXVII
WordPress.com Growth – I wonder what other big sites are out there that we don’t realise are big?
Tom Coates: This is not a brothel… – very interesting thread about PR interaction with bloggers. Our words are not for sale etc.
Little Shops of Horrors – this is pretty much the main reason I dislike record stores; they not very useable.
Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings – banner adverts really only work for the person selling the space, not the advertiser.
Think of a Will as a Program You Can Only Test By Dying – “Of course, there is one additional reason that legal documents are so long: Many lawyers are paid by the hour.”
Yahoo! Audio Search – mmm, quite nifty. I partially like the inline, mini JS audio players.
Subversion, Bug Tracker, Sponsored Links, Oh My! – hmmm, I don’t think the insertion of adverts like this into free software is a particularly nice way of doing business.
Apple & The DRM Free Market Madness – the interesting bit is this: ”...broadband provider neuf Cegetel has unveiled plans that let its subscribers pay an additional EUR 4.99 a month for access to the entire catalog of...
Read more ➔Good and Bad
It’s not too often that a company makes a move that is obviously good for their customers, but seemingly pretty bad for them. But that’s exactly what Adobe has just done by adding H.264 support to Flash (read a good write up at Read/WriteWeb or a more technical discussion at kaourantin.net).
Adobe has pretty much won the online video war, fighting off very strong competitors in the form of Apple, Real and Microsoft. Even with the rise of iTunes and hence the rise in QuickTime installs Flash video has completely overtaken pretty much everywhere – I can’t remember the last time I watched a video online that wasn’t played using Flash.
With the rise and domination of Flash as the primary delivery method for video content online so to has the FLV video format flourished. FLV is the proprietary video format created by Adobe (then Macromedia) used in the Flash Player to play video – it’s Flash’s native video format. Hence FLV is used by practically everybody that’s using Flash to play video.
Which is why this move is so odd, especially for Adobe who seem to be trying to become an ever more relevant ‘big’ software player. Supporting H.264...
Read more ➔DRM Apocalypse
The hot topic of the moment seems to again rolled back around to being DRM. The most current talk is revolving around both Universal’s new DRM-less experiment and also Wall-Mart’s selling of MP3s. Wall-Mart’s move (read more on it here) is – to be honest – not massively interesting; it’s simply a signpost of the state of the industry at the moment.
Universal jumping on board the DRM-free train is no less surprising; it’s become pretty obvious that DRM isn’t having any positive impact (and lots of negative PR) and now that EMI have blazed a path Universal can follow suit without having the risk of the first to jump. What is interesting is Universal’s slightly desperate attempts to undermine iTunes, by not extending their DRM-free trial to iTunes and by promoting a new competitor (Gbox).
It’s quite a unique situation where Universal – the biggest record label – can try and deliberately sabotage and compete with the biggest online music retailer (also the 3rd biggest music retailer in the US across all formats). I can’t imagine them setting up physical shops to try and compete with HMV (although in the current physical retail environment that’s probably a good idea).
However,...
Read more ➔Reading Festival iCals
It’s that time of year again.
Oh yes!
Reading Festival time.
Reading – unlike that vast majority of people I know, seemingly – is a festival geared almost exactly to my music taste. I’m not referring of course to most of the the tripe they put on the Main Stage (Razorlight? Red Hot Chill Peppers? I don’t think so) but to the line-ups of the other, smaller stages, which always manage to have at least one band I’d like to see playing at any one time.
It doesn’t hurt that, being originally from the ode to concrete that is Reading, I don’t have to camp; to be honest after a rather inconvenient experience at Glastonbury where my tent was stolen (not something in my tent, but the whole thing – contents and all. Luckily it was 20m away with the thief inside, but that’s another story…) I’m really not into the idea of camping at a festival ever again.
Anyway, for all you fellow Reading go-ers I have a little treat; I’ve got a hold of the schedule for the weekend and – after a bout of thrilling data entry – I’ve turned into into .ics calendar files, which can be used by iCal on...
Read more ➔Less is more
One of the more interesting things that sparked up while I was away was the controversy surrounding the new version of iMovie that Apple have launched as part of iLife ‘08. You can read a fairly thorough account of the situation over on Appleinsider.
The general thrust of the conversation is along the lines of:
‘Eeeek.’
‘What?’
‘This new version of iMovie doesn’t do the one, vital thing I always used to use it to do!’
‘But doesn’t it make everything else much easier to do?’
‘Yes, but…’
’- and can’t you use the old version still anyway?’
I find it rather fascinating how indignant people can get on the internet. In this situation, nothing is being taken away – the old version still works – but yet their still seems to be an outpouring of bad feeling.
This is, of course, yet another in the long line of examples of how the customer is wrong. The new version of iMovie is better in almost every conceivable way. For the vast majority of users, it makes assembling some movie clips they’ve filmed to upload to the internet – or burn onto a DVD – much easier then before. However, there is one universal truth in software development:...
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