Let’s face it, we all thought Tweetie 2 was abandonware, but with the announcement on Macheist that a private bate is opening up soon for those who bought the bundle, it will finally see the light of day!

Now, a while back I moved away from the whole Tweetie system, iPhone app and Mac application, and over to Echofon. I paid for the full iPhone version and have been beta testing the Mac version, and let me tell you, it is pretty much wonderful. So here is a list of things Tweetie 2 needs to do for me to move back over blindly. (I will probably try it out for a few days either way, but ticking some of the boxes here would make the choice easier.)

1. Syncing between the iPhone and Mac applications. This is one of thise features that I didn’t know I needed until I found it with Echofon. It’s pretty wondeful, and allows you to pick up exactly where you left off on either your Mac or Iphone without having to do endless scrolling. This should also work across all the Macs you own.

2. All the new Twitter features like RTs, Lists, geotagging and such

3. Push updates on the iPhone. I know it’s not a feature of a Mac application, but this will be important for bringing me back into the whole Tweetie ecosystem.

4. We should be able to log into bit.ly and such so that shortened links go into our bit.ly accounts.

So there are my top four wants for Tweetie 2. I suppose I will have to wait until next month when I hopefully get into the beta like Macheist said I would. Hopefully they have learnt from the Cha-Ching mess though. Several years later I’m still awaiting my beta for that.

Tags: Mac, tweetie, twitter

These days, a huge swodge of blog reading is done on iPhones and other smartphones, and we all know how hard it can be to navigate a blog on one of these devices, flicking around the place to view pictures and such. So, if you are reading this blog post on YOUR smartphone, chances are you have noticed something about now. The Scodio Blog has magical inbuilt ability to completely transform itself to best fit whatever device you are reading it on! The same of course goes for www.ViewFromTheQuad.com, my podcast’s website. On the VFTQ site, there is even a way for iPhone users to stream episodes without having Safari open! (Hint: play an episode of VFTQ, and use the home button to exit out of Safari, not closing the Quicktime window that pops up.) Who says the iPhone can’t multitask?

First thing is first. It is important to recognise that this is actually quite an easy feat to accomplish. Like, crazy easy. It basically comes down to what plugins you use, and if you have a podcast, how you encode your media files.

Optimise site for iPhone and other Smartphones

First thing is first. You are going to want to make your site work with pretty much every smartphone out there. If you use Wordpress, this is easily accomplished by installing the WPtouch plugin, developed by Brave New Code. They say this on the matter of the plugin: “WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm touch mobile device.” It does all sorts of cool things, like formatting the site to Apple’s App Store design specs, allowing you to integrate your tweets, add one of those cool iPhone home screen iPhones for when people want to add your blog to their homescreen, like an actual app and it rescales your photographs and such. It’s wonderful! It even allows you to run Google Adsense, Google Analytics code and other custom code, and it works with 99% of Wordpress apps that would be useful on a mobile device.

Get your media ready for background play on iPhones

If you are a podcaster using any kind of blog system which links to it’s media files directly in the posts (such as the wonderful and powerful Powerpress plugin for Wordpress) that magical background playing I mentioned is probably already already working. If you aren’t linking to media files directly in your posts, start doing it. Now.

Note that you must be encoding your media in a format that iTunes recognises. So basically MP3 or AAC. But I don’t know of many podcasters who don’t encode in MP3 anyway, so you should be fine in this regard.

“But what if I don’t use Wordpress, Cian?”

Well, I can offer a few ideas. If you use RapidWeaver, some themes such as many of those developed by NimbleHost come with cool inbuilt iPhone themes that make the website look wonderful on an iPhone and an Android based phone. For CMSes like Drupal, I took a quick look around but couldn’t find anything. If you handbuild your own sites, you probably don’t need this article.

Tags: android, blog, iPhone, plugins, smartphones, WPtouch

Some of you may have noticed that I enjoy writing fiction quite a lot. I often then go on to either podcast these stories, or post them right here on this very blog. Some I do both. However, I have always had a problem with writing, something that I have not yet solved.

How to start?

When it comes to assigned fiction, give me a title, and off I go. Most of the pieces of fiction that I read out on VFTQ or post here likely were written for school, in a very short period of time. Give me a general topic or title, and after a bit of brainstorming, I’m off. However, when it comes to actually coming up with my own ideas, I either decide that they suck, or I just can’t flesh them out enough.

Take, for example, a short story I’m working on at the moment (as a means for testing Scrivener). Basic premise (as it stands) is thus: (And I’m being vague for a reason)

• At some point in the future, the US gets pissed off at Europe, which is now a Super State, declares war. There may have been oil or conservative Christians involved somewhere.
• Dangerous negotiations, due to it being the future, are carried out by digital consciousnesses, and Europe sends one because they don’t want to have to kick the US’s ass in a war. Lit, the negotiator sent, gets stolen by a group while in transit, who want to reverse engineer him to find out what makes his AI tick.
• ???
• Profit!

So, I have the general idea set out for this story (but I’m keeping a fair bit of it from you) but I just don’t know what to do now. For whatever reason, I have total writer’s block, something that just doesn’t happen when I am given a topic, and just told to “write it, Cian”.

Tags: block, fiction, Writing

So, this September, Liz and myself are shipping off to DragonCon, the geekiest convention ever created. If a comedy is slagging off geeks, this is the convention they use as a backdrop. That is how awesome this thing is going to be.

So, this whole mad story started back in my 4th year, when I attended the last New Media Expo to be held in California. This was a pretty much 100% business conference, with multiple talks going on all the time about how to make money out of your show, how to sell your show to listeners and how to “monetize the user experience”. While it was great fun, and VERY informative, I found that I got little chance to hang out with people I only knew online, such as Scott Sigler, Tee Morris and the likes. (In fact, I 100% blame my short time and inability to buy Siggy a drink on Tee, but that’s another story, for another time.) Dragon*Con, however, will be 100% about the fandom side of sci-fi and such, and thus I hope to get more hangout time, and less getting glared at for being a teenager in a “Big Boy Conference”. Which happened.

Originally, there were meant to be three of us going on the trip. Liz, Girl X and myself. So we got in touch with John Merlin, who was also attending the conference (with me… We are planning something, and YOU can’t know what it is! Yet!) and booked us a nice roomy 4 person bedroom, two kingsize beds, breakfast and all. Then, all of a sudden, Liz and Girl X seemingly dropped out on me, leaving me pretty screwed over, in terms of that hotel that Zard had booked. It didn’t take long, however, for Zard and I to work something out, and I soon rebooked a two person room in the Swanky (and much closer to the event) Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel (second-tallest all-hotel skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere)

One thing that people may remember me for from the last conference I was at was my signed microphone, which I handed around the New Media Expo and got people to sign, resulting in people remembering me to this day. I may be pulling a similar gag this year, just with my new MXL V67 microphone, but I shall have to consider it. It has slightly less body space, as far as I can see, so I may have to let people sign the grill.

So, I have a few questions for you.

If you have ever been to Dragon*Con, or a similar huge conference, what sort of gear should I bring with me? I am aware of the 3-2-1 rules (three hours slate, two square meals and one shower per day) but what else should I know?

Should I book restaurants long in advance?

Last, but not least, who else will be going? I wanna meet you all at some point!

Tags: con, convention, Dragoncon, geek

You will remember that last week, I published a huge blog post on the topic of Online Backups, and mentioned here and there that I had a survey that I was conducting about how people backed up online. Well, It’s time to let that survey into the wild, with a grand total of 25 people taking it.

This question was designed to weed out the people who didn’t actually back up, so that I wouldn’t get a whole lot of useless data later. However, this useless data issue did come up, but not to the extent that it might have.

When somebody said if they backed up or not, I asked them to give a reason. The general reason that people gave was that they are too lazy, something that I don’t feel is an issue with backing up any more, what with Time Machine and the online services mentioned in my previous article. Just set them and forget them.

This data actually quite surprised me, as I never imagined that so many people would be using online backup services. While, predictably, the majority of people use a harddrive, there is a significant number of people who use the likes of Mozy and Backblaze. It should be noted that the people who marked “Other” were referring to the likes of Blu-Ray disks, DVDs and homebuilt servers. I should have thought of including them.

However, once we take a look at this data, things get starkly different. Out of the 11 people to said that they use Online Services for backup, only 4 of them said that this was their favorite method, and looking over the raw data, only two of these people were people who also selected the harddrive option. Not looking so great for the online services now! Other again referrers to homebrew servers and the like.

Not much commentary that can be done on this graph, to be honest, except that most people seem to have a LOT more external harddrive space then I do. I am impressed!

As we can see on this graph, Amazon S3 is the preferred method of online backup. (I’m discounting Dropbox, of course, as it is not technically a backup suite. However, I stuck it in there so everybody wouldn’t click “Other”. Interestingly, almost everybody who said that they used Dropbox also said that they used Amazon S3, further enforcing it’s popularity.

Amazon S3 wins again!

You may view the raw data for this survey at Google Docs.
Thanks to all those who took part!

Tags: backblaze, backup, dropbox, mozy, Online, Survey

This is part 1 of a larger article on Online Backup systems. In this part, I cover the different companies that I have tried out along with one or two that I have not. The second part of this series will be based around a survey that I am running about online backup systems. If you backup at all, online or offline, PLEASE fill this anonymous survey out so that I can get more data points. Thanks!

Recently, I have become more and more interested in the possibilities presented to me by online backup services. Places like Dropbox, Backblaze and Mozy offer huge (and often limitless) amounts of harddrive space in a building somewhere on the planet protected by armed forces and Minority Report-esque security features. However, for every advantage to using online backup, there is most likely a disadvantage. In Backblaze’s case, for instance, their datacenter, and thus, your datacenter, is located in San Fransisco, which means that tomorrow it’s probably going to be hit by an earthquake or something. Even though you can backup anywhere there is an internet connection, it’s gonna take a LONG time to get that first backup out of the way. (I’m 7 days into my first backup, and have uploaded about 42GB so far. Thankfully in the future Backblaze, the service that I am using, will only backup files that change. It should be noted, however, that these speed problems are likely not the fault of the backup provider, and more the fault of Vodafone and Comreg who are a bunch of incompetents when it comes to getting what speed broadband you are buying correct.)

“So”, you might say. “Why bother with this online backup rubbish? I have my harddrive sitting here next to me, which can do in minutes what might take days to do online.”

Let’s get something clear. Online backup should not be done, in my opinion, on it’s own. It should be supplementing a hard backup that you do every day at home, with a harddrive somewhere in your house. For Mac, this is redonkulously easy to set up, with the wonderful TimeMachine. Mac users simply have NO excuse not to go dig up an old external harddrive (or get a nice cheap one, places like Reads sell 1TB worth of delicious harddrive space for about €99) and just either leave it connected to your home computer 24/7, or just plug it into your laptop whenever you are at your desk. For Windows users, you will find a similer, perfectly capable backup system built into Windows 7. Online backup should be used for when you are out and about and accidentally delete a small number of files, or in case your house burns down in some horrendous oven accident, taking your harddrive backup with it. (Speaking of which, you did remember to turn the gas off, right? Better go check) However, the scope of this article does not include offline backup, and my good friend @SirJolt has written a pretty large article on this just today on the Komplett blog.

Mozy

The first of the lot I tried using was Mozy. I used it pretty much for two years solid, but never needed to use it to restore anything of great importance, as I was on the free account, and only used it to backup school essays and such. Nonetheless, I somehow have used 1.4 GB on it. Like all the online backup programs, you install a tiny little menubar application which just does it’s job in the background. However, it has a pretty low uptake among people who know lots about this subject, with a survey I carried out only showing 5% of respondents saying that they used it. Some complaints that can be found online are that the application (available both for Mac and PC) just sort of gunks up the system, makes everything run slow and tends to crash. I never suffered from any of these things, but I wasn’t backing up a huge amount of data, so I think that if you want some free backup space, go grab their 2gb offer for free, as it did the business for me. If you want to do a large amount of backing up, however, they may not be the best choice. Christopher Breen of PC world talks about some of the issues that he had in his PC World article. Another thing that I should mention is that Mozy won’t post your data to you on a harddrive, should you need it. They insist on sending you rather expensive DVDs or making you download everything. Which would take a while, I would imagine. However, as I said, Mozy are good, in my experience, for keeping an extra safe backup of those little important files. And remember that Mozy only ever backs up files that have been changed, meaning that after the first backup, everything SHOULD be nice and zippy, so long as you don’t fall foul of one of the weird bugs which will make your computer slow to a crawl. A year worth of unlimited Mozy backup runs you $54.45 per year.

Dropbox

Dropbox was the most picked online backup option, despite the fact that technically it doesn’t offer backups. Dropbox is basically a file synchronization service. You get a little folder in your Home directory (for Mac users, I suppose it is a network folder on Windows) called “Dropbox” and you just drop files in there. Instantly, all the other computers linked to your account download that file. It’s wonderful for what it does, again giving you 2GB for free. I use it a lot, again for school files. There is something just wonderful in knowing that no matter what computer in my house I write an essay on, it will instantly be on every single one of the other computers as well, as if by magic. It works stunningly fast, and has never once broken for me. It’s a real setup and go. However, can it be considered a backup solution? I don’t think so. Due to it’s synchronization backbone, once you delete a file on your computer (or it is deleted by a little kid who has run riot in your office) it deletes from the service as well. Not really a good backup solution, if you ask me. However, as I have stated in the past, Dropbox is basically what Apple’s MobileMe iDisk wants to be. iDisk constantly breaks, doesn’t sync and is generally clunky. Dropbox, on the other hand, is pretty much perfect in every way. If file synchronization is your deal, get a free Dropbox account, but I wouldn’t use it for any important files that you just HAVE to have backed up. While the first 2GB are free on Dropbox, a 50GB account will run you $99 per year, with a 100GB account costing $199, which means that per GB, you are paying $1 extra dollar for your second 50GB. Which is odd. But anyways.

Backblaze

Backblaze is the service that I am using at the moment. As far as I can see, it mixes the simplicity of Dropbox with the backup ability of Mozy. The entire client side of this system is contained in one insanely simple preference pane, which can get quite advanced if you want too. Unlike Mozy, Backblaze just automatically backs everything up (except for a few files, but we will get back to those) unless you tell it too, which includes any external harddrives you connect, as well as any flash drives connected. Which is kind of nice. You also get more control in how you throttle your upload speed, something which is important if you are uploading 50+GB. You don’t after all, want your network to grind to a halt for a week as you back up! Backblaze chooses not to backup some files, such as the system files (Not really needed, as you likely still have your OS disk for if something horrible happened) and Application files (which means that you will have to track down copies of all your programs, which should not be too difficult. However, it does keep the application settings files, so that once you redownload the programs, they will be working as they always had.) Personally, I have also set it up to not backup my downloads folder, as there are often huge files in there that are deleted within a couple of days. I imagine that I would tell the other options not to back these up as well. Another issue that somebody may have with Backblaze is that it doesn’t keep copies of any files bigger then 4GB. It does, however, keep all old copies of each file for 30 days, which turns it in to a sort of online timemachine. One interesting question I haven’t yet been able to get an answer to (due to my backup not yet being fully finished) is if Backblaze backs up all accounts. I don’t see why it wouldn’t, but I have not yet gotten an answer from the company despite getting in contact with them several times. However, I don’t see why it wouldn’t, as I can see Backblaze running from all the accounts on my Mac. Again, like Mozy, once the HUGE first backup is complete, it only backs up files that have altered, meaning that everything is zippy. This includes your iPhoto library, which although it looks like one file, is actually a folder pretending to be a file. This means it will be just as zippy as everything else. Backblaze don’t offer any free account, but they have a 15 day trial account and it is cheaper then Mozy per year, coming out at a round $50 for an account.

Others

For users who are more willing to get their hands wet in the world of Online Backup, a service like JungleDisk may well end up much cheaper. It connects into an Amazon S3 account, which means that along with the $2-$3 you pay JungleDisk per month for the use of their backup software, you will be paying Amazon a certain amount per GB transfer, data stored and such. The pricing system is sort of complex, so I suggest that you check it out yourself. However, it comes with the happy note that it can also be used to sync your data with other computers, much like DropBox. It got a solid 10% of use in my survey, and people seem to be happy with the lower prices. However, it is not a simply set it and forget it service, and you have to deal with two companies instead of one.

Some of the other companies in the big bad world of Online Backup are Carbonite and iDrive, both chosen by about 5% of surveyed people, but I never have actually had the chance to try either of these services out, so I can’t really talk about them.

Winner

In the end, out of the services that I have tried out, Backblaze is the clear winner. Sure, it doesn’t back up system files, but those are so big that it would take you ages to download them anyways. May as well just reinstall the OS if it comes to that.

Many of the links here are referral links. However, none of the services above are paying me to write this article. Any extra backup space acquired by you signing up to these services using my link will be put to good use. Also, any mentions of the survey are correct as of the 10th of February 2010. Full details on the survey will be released in Part 2. Again, please fill out the anonymous survey to help me get more accurate data!

Tags: backblaze, backup, dropbox, mozy, Online

Standing outside the cinema, Chell took a long, drawn out puff of his fag. It was 9PM, and he was waiting for his mates to arrive for the 21:15 showing. He didn’t know what movie would be running. It was a small town with a small cinema, so they didn’t really get to choose what they would watch. It was usually reruns of old ones anyway. He heard his nickname being yelled across the empty car park and saw Joe and Mad (or Madeline as she was known by her parents, much to her chagrin) slouching over in his direction. He waved. Two down, one to go. Thomas, or Tee as his friends called him (after T-Pain) due to his proficiency in the boxing ring, was always late. Or almost late. But never on time. He preferred to say that he was almost early, but that was just stupid. Late is late.

The three stood in silence, after the usual grunting greeting. Chell took another drag, feeling the warm bonfire light up in his chest. He had just started the week before, and was still not so sure if he liked it, although he was getting used to the taste. Joe and Mad were already lit up, hand in hand. Mad couldn’t afford cigarettes, so mostly survived on discarded butts. She claimed that the fire burnt off any bacteria, which was Science, Chell supposed. She called it “Dragging the Dregs.” These days, Joe usually bought for her anyway. He inhaled, but lacking full concentration, began to cough and splutter. Tee had been smoking for five years now, trying to quit every few months. He described the feeling after a day going cold turkey as if “your favorite food, pizza, chips, whatever, had just been taken off the face of the earth. And you are hungry.” Chell hoped that he would never have to stoop to dragging the dregs.

10 minutes later, Tee still hadn’t arrived. The group conferred, and decided that they were getting cold, and didn’t want to miss the start of the movie. Chell would have preferred to wait for Tee, as attempting to enjoy anything in a dark room with Mad and Joe was just impossible. Awkward to the highest extreme, but he went along with it anyway. It had started to rain, and the small dead looking trees surrounding the car park weren’t offering much shelter. They crossed the road, heading towards the bright lights of the cinema, and entering the foyer, were hit by the smell of buttered popcorn, soft drinks and a slight twinge of bile. It was the late showing, after all.

As always, the group didn’t pay for entry. Joe distracted the ticket attendant, as Chell and Mad snuck in past her, perfectly silent in their huge, scuffed, black boots. Joe then waited until a larger group of kids started showing her tickets, and followed them in. Flawless entry. As he went up the center isle, he took a large popcorn and Coke from a seat, glaring at it’s owner, a younger kid who was there with his sister. The kid didn’t say anything, just continued to stare ahead. Best not to mess with the older kids, he had been told. And this suited Joe just fine.

The movie was called Requiem for a Dream, and Chell didn’t like it one bit. The story bugged him. Nobody could end up that screwed up from a little bit of speed, right? He didn’t use anything himself, and the smoking hardly counted. But still. Everybody knows it is mostly safe. He kept thinking about this until he heard a commotion from the lobby, and heard Tee’s voice ring out in anger. They must have tried to make him pay for the ticket. Bad move. Standing up in the isle, he brushed against the knees of the other audience members, none of them standing for him. Blinking his eyes in the brightness of the lobby, he saw Tee being held up against the far wall by two huge security guards, protesting. “It’s against the law! I’m a British citizen!” he howled. He wasn’t one for the reality of rules and regulations, Chell smiled to himself.

As he made his way towards the scuffle to try to talk everybody down, Tee managed to take a swing at the smaller of the two guards, landing a punch against his right cheek with a thump. In that same instant, a sickening crack split the air, and a beat later, the guard was on the floor, cradling his broken jaw in his hands. Chell sighed. This was not the first time that something like this had happened. Only last month, he had to bail Tee out of a barfight because he started shouting obscenities at some Celtic fan. Chell had walked away with a broken nose, but “Auld Hoops” as Tee had called him had been the worse for wear.

This time, though, the fight was entirely Tee’s. Chell had nothing to do with it, and didn’t want another visit to the hospital for a painful examination. So he acted as if he hadn’t seen anything and continued past the scene right out the door. There was nothing he could do. Tee would spend the night in the station again, and all would be fine.

Except it wouldn’t, would it? Tee would likely not be pleased with Chell. But they could deal with that when they came to it. Suddenly, he heard a gunshot ring out from inside the building. He started, and looked back. The second guard was on the floor now, seemingly unconscious, and a man with a suit was standing with his back to Chell, pointing a handgun directly at Tee, who now had his hands in the air, and was backing towards the popcorn stand. Chell instantly saw why. There was a pan of hot oil on the counter, waiting for popcorn kernels. Damn. Tee was about to get himself shot. Chell calmly strolled into the foyer, unclipping his small penknife as he did.
“Come on guys! Lets all just think about what’s happening here.” The gun wielder looked around at the same time as Tee flung the oil, landing it just inches short of where his target stood. The world seemed to slow around Chell. Snorting in anger, the man re-aimed the pistol and pulled back the hammer. Without saying a word, he pulled the trigger.

Blood. There was blood everywhere. On his hands, on his combats, on his t-shirt. Tee was nowhere to be seen, but the guy with the gun was lying on the ground, whimpering. Looking down, Chell saw his penknife on the ground, bloodied. He shrunk back for just a second, before kneeling down next to the man on the floor. His nametag said “Hello! My Name Is Matt.” Chell looked into the mans eyes, and began to rock on his soles. “I’m sorry”, he assured the man, who just stared back at him, wide eyed in shock and pain. “I thought you were gonna shoot Tom. I just wanted to scare you. I…” Chell broke off, feeling a few drops run down his face. “We’re going to get you fixed up. Don’t worry.”

Chell called the guards, hot tears now streaming past his nose, down his cheeks and dropping into the ever-growing puddle of blood. The cinema-goers gathered around, Joe and Mad holding hands, white knuckled. One woman was crying, hysterical. A teenager Chell didn’t recognise was using her phone to video the scene, no doubt to send to her friends. What a story she would have!

Stooping over the man again, Chell tried to stem the flow of blood with his torn up shirt. The wound was deep but small, and it gushed. Chell tried to patch up the wound as best as he could, but he just couldn’t stop the bleeding.

One of the guards, the one with the broken jaw, brought over a first aid kit, and started wiping around the wound, pushing Chell away violently.

Chell sat in the corner, feeling completely useless, and waited for the police to arrive.

Tags: fiction, short story

About three weeks ago, I stumbled upon an iPhone app called Sleep Cycle. This application promised to wake me at a time at which I was closest to a ‘waking state’, and thus leave me less sleepy and tired in the morning, something that I have a fair problem with which results in headaches and general grumpieness. It does this by measuring how much you are moving throughout the night, then waking you within a half hour time period that you set yourself, when it thinks you are sleeping lightest.

The Set-up

What you need to do while using this app sounds a bit dodgy at first. You run the app, choose your lovely sounding wakeup noise, set the latest time at which you would like to be woken, start the alarm and just put the iPhone face down on the mattress close to your head. Make sure not to power the phone down or put it on hold! The app powers down the screen, powering it back up if you pick it up to check the time. I rather like how it handles this, as it displays it in a nightime friendly way, that won’t burn out your retinas.

Next, you go to sleep.

Once you have done that successfully, the app sits on the side of your bed, dutifully recording all your movements, and compiling them into a chart what looks like this:

Sleepcycle - Stats

By use of this, you can try to work out at exactly what time you had that dream where you were swimming in a giant picklejar in the sky. The application also uses the data to work out at what time would be the best moment to wake you, so you feel least sleepy. Whether it works or not is in debate.

If we take a look at the App Store reviews, people are pretty damn sure that it works. We get the odd voice of descent, with Peter Dublin claiming that all it does is sound the alarm 10 minutes before you ask it too. I haven’t found this in my testing, but maybe there is some monkeywork going on behind the scenes.

In full, the app worked for me for three or so nights, but after that, it seemed to stop having an effect on how sleepy I was once I woke up. Maybe you will have different results, and if you have tried the app, let me know what you think in the comments! Some more screenshots are below, click them to view them bigger and get more information on each of the screens.

Tags: app, iPhone, ipod touch, sleep

I have always used Newsfire to read my hundred odd RSS feeds. It’s a wonderful UI, easy to use and is everything that I could ever want in a news reader. Well, almost everything.

While there was, at some point, an iPhone version of the app in development, it never got finished. It is vaporware. (Now that I think of it, Newsfire itself hasn’t been updated in many months). With the arrival of the iPhone into my technological family, I have been looking for a way to get my news feeds onto the iPhone. Looking around a bit, it seemed that Google Reader was the best way to sync RSS feeds around multiple computers and devices, but I hated it’s web interface, and really disliked how NetNewsWire works, both on iPhone and on Mac.

So, I found Gruml, a client for Google Reader. I also found an iPhone app called Newsie, and it is these that I shall be talking about for the remainder of this blog post.

First, Gruml.

It is a fairly plainly set out RSS reader, with the feeds and folders listed down the left of the screen, and the rest split between a list of articles based on the folder or feed you are in, and of course, the article that you have selected. It allows you open links in it’s inbuilt browser if you wish, or just open them behind the application in your default browser, which is what I do. It allows you see much more information at once then Newsfire does, yet Newsfire just seems to be that slightly better app then Gruml. But I can forgive this, as Gruml has the ability, in a round about sort of way, to sync with my iPhone. And once Newsfire comes out with an iPhone version, I will be heading back to them in an instant.

So, what are the Pros of Gruml, minus any iPhone-y type things?

Firstly, it works with Google Reader, as I have mentioned. This allows you to view your feeds anywhere you are, and sync your feeds across many Macs and PCs, which is certainly very nice for when I’m bored at school and the computer room is open. Being connected to Google Reader, it also allows you share your “stared” articles with people you know, which is nice.

Another nice thing about Gruml is that it works fullscreen much better then Newsfire ever did. I don’t know why this is, but I am more comfortable with it fullscreen then I ever was with Newsfire. For things like browsers and high-information apps, I really do like to take up as much screen real-estate as I can, so as not to be distracted. It can also push Growl notifications, which is nice.

A fairly large con with Gruml is that everything you do is attached with a big of lag. Wanna check out a folder? You gotta wait for Gruml to get in contact with Google Reader, which takes a couple of miliseconds. Wanna read a feed? Be prepared to wait 1-3 seconds for it to load, as it doesn’t seem to be cached on the machine very well. Which is kind of odd. I never ran up against this problem in Newsfire, which loaded feeds like the bejaysus. This is, however, seemingly down to the whole nature of Google Reader. It is, of course, on the cloud.

Now, let’s talk about the iPhone Google Reader client, Newsie.

Click images to see gallery

Newsie is a fairly new iPhone app designed to let you read your feeds in peace, without having to load them all at once. It syncs with Google Reader, which is what makes it so very attractive to me. Take a look around the gallery above to check out some of what it looks like.

Other then the slight lag as it communicates with Google Reader, it works pretty much flawlessly. It integrates with both Tweetie and Twitteriffic (although it would be nice if it didn’t leave you to have to type out the headling that you are sharing – it only sends the link to the Twitter application), it remembers where you are in an article or list of articles if you close down the app, it allows you to view the original content in fullscreen and has this super speedy starring system so that you can just flick a headline to star it, which will both place it in your “Starred” folder, and cache the original webpage. This allows you to hunt down interesting things to read while you are waiting for the bus, and to read them on the bus where you may not be guaranteed 3G signal.

I would love it to have Push though, or a badge on the icon showing how many unread stories there are on your list. That would be seriously cool.

All in all, Newsie is a very capable app. I love how you can “lock” it’s screen, so that if you are reading the iPhone sideways, such as in bed, it won’t autorotate. I love how this feature is just a single tap away, no matter where you are in the app, and hides away when it’s not needed. I love it’s starring system, although I’m having some trouble deleting cached pages. Check it out at it’s site, and if you think it’s for you, try out the app!

How do you get your feeds? I have over 150 of them syncing away at any one moment, and always want to hear about how I can streamline my readers. Have you tried either of these apps?

Tags: google reader, iPhone, newsfire, newsie, RSS

UPDATE: Head to the bottom of this article to check out the CEO of McGraw-Hill totally outing Apple on their Tablet! It’s confirmed, people!

As we all know, tomorrow Apple is having a keynote. They are, as usual, keeping totally tight lipped as to what will be announced, but we are all pretty damn sure that it will be tablet hardware. However, hopefully they will do some software refreshes as well, and the following is what I want to see.

iPhone

Let’s be honest, here, people. The iPhone home screen is pretty difficult to get around. If you have lots of pages of apps, chances are you have to go flipping and flipping and flipping to find the one that you want. For instance, if I want to find one of my most used apps, “iFartz 2010 Biggest Evar Farts Application”, I need to flick to page 5 of my apps. And this takes time, time which might make my classy little joke a little late. And NOBODY want’s to make a joke late, right? This is what I’m thinking. You know Exposé on your Mac? I want to be able to do that for iPhone pages. If you are on any home screen, I want to be able to use three fingers to flip up or down, and then a 3 x 3 grid of homescreens will be displayed. I tap which one I want to head into, and boom. Easy access to “iFartz 2010 Biggest Evar Farts Application” along with all my other apps. Of course, if you had any more then 6 home screens, you could scroll down to see them. But if you have more then 6 home screens, you might need to get checked out. That’s 54 apps you have there.

[EDIT: Holy Crap, somebody pointed out that Steven Troughton-Smith, mentioned further down in the article, has developed THIS EXACT THING for Jailbroken iPhones! Apple! HIRE THIS MAN!]

While I’m on the subject of apps, I want some sort of auto-sort for apps I download. I want to say that homescreen 5 is my games screen, and have any games I download sent there automatically. Of course, this may get difficult when I fill up that screen, but it could then give me the option to dedicate another screen to games, which would be inserted, pushing screen 6 to screen 7 and creating a new blank screen 6, ready and waiting to receive my new game.
I want multitasking. Or if I don’t get multitasking, I want some sort of inbuilt push system. I want my RSS feeds to automatically update in Newsie, dammit! (More coming on Newsie in a later blog post.) While I’m at it, I want the Notes application to be able to sync over the air, like all the other MobileMe Push apps on the iPhone.

How about stacks? You know, those things that nobody I know uses that Mac OS X people can use on the dock? Basically, you click on it and a big drawer opens up, allowing you to place any application or document in it for easy access. Let’s have that on the iPhone! I want to be able to put a stack on the bottom bar of my iPhone, (a “cool games” one, for instance) and then just tap it so it springs open, allowing me open any app with ease. That would be nice. In fact, an Irish developer called Steven Troughton-Smith has developed a Stacks application for Jailbroken iPhones which is pretty much perfect. Apple! Buy it off him!

You know what would be really cool? I have my iPhone sitting here, next to my Macbook Pro. It’s on the same Wi-fi network, and has bluetooth. It can connect wirelessly in these two manors. How about I can send a text message from my Macbook Pro and have it routed through the iPhone to be sent? Hell, how about the laptop doesn’t even need to be on the same wifi network, but sends it over the internet to be sent, Push style, to the iPhone, which will then send it on. That would be spiffy.

iWork

There is one thing that pisses me off about iWork.com, Apple’s cloud document service. You can’t edit from the cloud. Take a look at the likes of Google Docs, and I imagine that Apple could bite a fairly huge chunk of this market from Google if they were to give cloud editing a shot. In fact, how about when you buy iWork and own MobileMe, we get iWork webapps? Online versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers that integrate into your offline version. Sure, they might not be able to pull all the fancy moves that the desktop applications can, but it would be pretty damn useful! Every time I save a document, I want iWork to, in the backround, update the cloud version of the file, and visa versa. You can even use my MobileMe space, if you want! There is a Documents folder in there for something, after all!

A big problem with iWork is that the documents are not easily viewable by people who are on Windows, or Mac users who haven’t bought iWork. Of course, you can always do a little jiggling about with the file and fish out a PDF (more on this rather cool process at TUAW.com) but I want something more. Apple, after all, like their stuff to “Just Work”. So how about, when the file is opened on a computer which doesn’t have iWork or is a Windows machine, a really barebones integrated PDF viewer is opened instead, and opens up this PDF file? Sure, there is no editing ability, but it allows me to send files to anybody, and have them viewed by anybody! Perfect cross-platform document sharing!

MobileMe

MobileMe doesn’t have a huge number of problems. As I mentioned before, I want to be able to sync Notes.app over the air.

HOWEVER, one huge problem that MobileMe has is iDisk. Let’s not mince our words. In comparison to services like Dropbox, it is utterly shite. It stalls all the time and it takes ages to update. It stops working for no given reason and, most suprisingly for a product that is supposed to be “embedded into the core of the operating system”, we can’t share files directly from the finder. Dropbox, on the other hand, is utter perfection. Seriously Apple. Buy Dropbox, or develop something that is even almost equal to it. If you do, iDisk will become perfect, and much more useful. Hell, what would also be nice is Apple giving us unlimited storage (with a MobileMe subscription, of course) and making some sort of cloud based Time Machine. The likes of Mozy would NOT be happy with that, but we are already paying more for MobileMe then for an unlimited Mozy account, so I suspect that Apple can afford it. Sure, limit the amount of non backups we can keep, but unlimited backups (for, say, a 30 day period) over iDisk would be lovely. And make it real easy to order a complete restore. Maybe send it out on a USB harddrive or something. In fact, just copy Backblaze for the restore process.

iLife

I have no idea what I would want in an iLife refresh. Much much faster iPhoto loading, maybe. Oh! Since I have already requested unlimited MobileMe space, how about all my iPhoto pictures automatically get sent to the MobileMe cloud? Build in some social network ability, and BOOM! Apple have just knocked Flickr out of the market, when it comes to Macs, anyway. The MobileMe iPhoto gallery is cute, but not really good for sharing with friends.

While I’m on a “Move Everything to the Cloud” rant, how about putting our iTunes libraries up there? You just bought Lala, a serious contender in music streaming, so you have the tools in front of you. Why not allow me listen to my iTunes Library wherever I am?

So, in general, I want Apple to cloudify everything. Of course, this would make most of the Mac population totally kill their bandwidth (I only get 100gb up/down each month) so that would have to be sorted out.

What do YOU want to see announced tomorrow?

UPDATE Some silly CEO has outed Apple on their tablet. Oh-Oh…

Tags: Apple, apps, dropbox, iLife, iPhone, iWork, MobileMe, mozy, Software, stacks