Technology\Web Archives

The Beginning of a Blog

MAY 7, 2008

For anyone who has fallen in love with blogging, you remember those early days when writing 5,000 words a week was like breathing. Of course, back when I started, I wasn't nearly as poignant as Roger Ebert.

Ebertt is following a trend I see of established writers who finally get blogging. Their first few months of posts are filled with topics that have been sitting in a large pile — similar to my pile of New Yorkers — of information waiting to be shared. Yesterday's post from Ebert is a good example of something he's probably thought about a lot but hadn't found the right outlet to share.

Frank Bruni's Diner's Journal started the same way. Now that he has gotten all of the long held tidbits off his chest, he's invited other writers to keep up the output.

This is certainly not a revelation, but it is fun seeing well respected writers following the same trends we've seen from bloggers since the beginning. Unfortunately for all of us, Ebert and Bruni have never written blog posts like this.

Posted in Technology\Web at 10:23 am.
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My Top Feature Request for All Feed Readers

JANUARY 24, 2008

After putting together Simply Structured and years of hearing people gripe about the dearth of style in feed readers, I've realized my biggest request for NetNewsWire, or any reader for that matter, is customized styles for each feed. Even more, I don't just want the end-user to be able to customize styles, but for the author to be able to push styles alongside their content.

Styles on a feed-by-feed basis isn't a huge stretch, especially in NNW where style packages already exist, but pushing styles with your feed is something RSS and Atom don't support. But so what? In the early days of HTML, Netscape Navigator went beyond the HTML spec and added unsupported styles that developers wanted and the web is a better place for it. I'm not advocating for every feed reader to require its own custom flavor of RSS, but if they could add one line that was easily ignored by other RSS parsers, it would make for a fantastic experience. If we're already designing custom versions of sites for our iPhones and other mobile platforms, why not feed readers too?

You could argue custom styles unnecessarily complicate a feed reader, but I don't think it effects how most people consume feeds. The primary benefit of feed readers is having a device that notifies you when there is new content. The second largest benefit is having all the content in one place. Individual styles don't diminish these facts and help bring some individuality back to the web. In a time when we all have custom homepages and visit fewer and fewer sites, it'd be nice to inject a bit more personality into our daily lives.

Posted in Technology\Web at 1:27 pm.
3 Comments |

Simply Structured: A NetNewsWire Style

JANUARY 14, 2008

I'm an avid NetNewsWire user and was ecstatic when they announced it is now free. I don't know if the announcement inspired me, but I decided the release of NNW 3.1 would be a good time to create a custom style. I've been a longtime user of EAB - Gray, so I used Eduardo's code as a base to get started.*

More than anything, I wanted a design that stayed out of the way. Reading posts via feeds instead of actual sites lets me consume more data. Having a simple, highly legible style makes it much easier. Here are the problems I hoped to solve and I think this new style does a good job with it.

• Highly legible type that squeezes as much content as possible on a page. Helvetica, Verdana and a base font size of 11px helped make this possible. I think short posts, long posts and image-heavy posts look good, if I do say so myself.
• Feed metadata that's easy to process. I like having the data at the top of the screen, but NNW defaults to putting it all in one line. Simply Structured adds labels and makes everything a little more orderly.
• Images that float right or left when they're supposed to. When an image style is not embedded inline, the style won't come through. I fixed this by adding styles for some common image style declarations. (If you end up using Simply Structured and find styles I haven't included, let me know and I'll put them in.)
• Even though I don't use it, I also adjusted the style to work with the widescreen view. You can see an example at the bottom of the entry.

Putting this together was a lot of fun. After years of worrying about IE6, Firefox 1.5 and who knows what else, it was refreshing to work in a closed system. I've never used :before before!

The style still isn't perfect, but it suits my needs. The biggest concession was cutting off long URLs in the feed metadata box, which only bothers me a little. If you do find any other problems, feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to fix it.

Installing Simply Structured

1. Download this: simply-structured-nnw.zip.
2. Unzip it and place "Simply Structured.nnwstyle" in the folder you keep your NNW stylesheets, which defaults to USER_NAME/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/StyleSheets/.
3. Open up NNW. If the style menu is not visible in the lower right corner of the application, click "Show Styles Menu" in the View menu. Then select Simply Structured and you're good to go!

More Screenshots

Widescreen view

All text

* Expect a post later this week about creating your own style and another one with my biggest feature request for NNW.

Posted in Technology\Web at 1:33 pm.
8 Comments |

The Air Car

JANUARY 7, 2008

This was going to be a quick post, but there were too many amazing facts to include. Before I list through them, the air car's engine was built by a French engineer and runs on compressed air. There is no emission and the car will cost $7,000 when Tata Motors releases it. While the list below is enlightening, watching this BBC video will tell you the story in 80 seconds.

• In the single energy mode MDI cars consume less than one euro every 100Km. (around 0.75 Euros) that is to say, 10 time less than gasoline powered cars.
• When there is no combustion, there is no pollution. The vehicle's driving range is close to twice that of the most advanced electric cars (from 200 to 300 km or 8 hours of circulation) This is exactly what the urban market needs where, as previously mentioned, 80% of the drivers move less than 60Km. a day.
• The recharging of the car will be done at gas stations, once the market is developed. To fill the tanks it will take about to 2 to 3 minutes at a price of 1.5 euros. After refilling the car will be ready to driver 200 kilometres.
• Because the engine does not burn any fuel the car's oil(a litre of vegetable) only needs to be changed every 50,000Km.
• The temperature of the clean air expulsed form the exhaust pipe is between 0 and 15 degrees below zero and can be subsequently channelled and used for air conditioning in the interior of the car.

They'll initially come to market with the MiniCat and the CityCat. This first generation technology sounds amazing. I can't wait to see where this is going to go.

Posted in Technology\Web at 1:00 pm.
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Kindle is Dead, Long Live Kindle

DECEMBER 4, 2007

Several weeks have passed since the release of Amazon's new eBook reader, Kindle, and I am ready to explain to you why this hardware will fail and why it is the first step towards the eventual end of paper books.

It's Still A Screen

Forget that it's ugly, because that doesn't matter too much. The biggest reason it will fail is that it does not replicate the experience of reading a book or magazine. From all I've read and seen, you are still reading on a super fancy, high contrast PDA. Chip Kidd put it best when he said, "People don't want to read books on a screen." I agree, but only because screens today suck.

This is where flexible screens come in. Right now in a lab somewhere, there is a painfully expensive piece of plastic that you can bend and will display video or still images. No matter what anyone tells you, this is not ready to use. As this 2004 BBC article notes, "eventually the displays are expected to be in colour". While no one knows exactly when, eventually there will be a flexible screen with contrast and resolution that comes incredibly close to paper. Remember digital cameras 10 years ago and the 600x480 photos they produced? Today we have 39 megapixel professional cameras and there will be a screen equally ridiculous ten years from now.

When flexible, 8"x10" color screens can run for a full day without a charge at 300dpi, then you'll hear paper books' death rattle. I want something that can approximate the experience of reading a broadsheet, a magazine and book while being able to play a video or song. Basically I want Harry Potter newspapers with sound.

Sharing is Good

The only other point of failure is Kindle's DRM. Dive Into Mark put it best, so I'll let you head there to find out the details, but I can't imagine not being able to lend my friend a book or magazine. Just like many of the music stores, if Amazon shuts of the service tomorrow your books are gone. The got the music store right, but they got this horrifically wrong.

The Rest Ain't Bad

The distribution method, the selection, the acquisition process and even paying for blogs are done well. Kindle makes reading books on a digital device very easy. They're just five to ten years too early.

Posted in Technology\Web at 6:38 pm.
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