Marktopia

One week with the iPod Touch and I feel it is time to share some apps that I have found interesting or useful.  All of these are free apps, I have not found an app that I have wanted to actually purchase yet.

Pandora - For those of you familiar with Pandora, you will love this app because it brings everything Pandora has to offer to your iPod or iPhone.  You can listen to any of your stations, thumbs up, thumbs down, etc.  If you are not familiar, go to pandora.com and check it out.

NetNewsWire - While not perfect, it does fit well into my news reading workflow.  Using the NewsGator service, I can sync what I have read on either the iPod or my Mac.  The browsing experience isn’t great on the iPod, but I can save items to the Clippings to read later on my Mac.

Twittelator - One of 4 or 5 Twitter apps, this is my preferred one.  It has no ads and doesn’t try to do a bunch of other things.  Simple and works well, that is what I am looking for in a Twitter app.

Labyrinth LE - The Lite (read: free) edition of Labyrinth.  This is a great example of the accelerometer in action as you tilt the device to move the ball around just like you would a real labyrinth board.  The physics of the ball are also amazing, making this a great app to show off the abilities of the device.

Mobile News Network - Basically a pull from the AP of stories nationwide and locally.  It has a nice collection of the day in pictures as well.  I like this better than the NYTimes app because of it’s simplicity.

Wordpress - The official application to post to a WordPress blog, this has most of the features of the standard web posting.  The only thing it is missing is the ability to do rich text editing of posts, meaning you have to know basic HTML to do any linking or whatnot.

I should note all of these are first generation applications.  It is pretty impressive to see this much quality stuff initially and it just whets my appetite for bigger and better things to come down the line in the next 6 months or so.

For those of you subscribed to my del.icio.us feed, I apologize for two reasons.  First off, I apologize because there has been no activity on it for months and months.  Second, I apologize because you got bombarded with a bunch of stuff today.  All of this was due to my new organization for bookmarks and stuff to read.  I had been gathering links all over the place, Firefox, NetNewsWire’s flagged items, old del.icio.us links, etc.   This made it difficult to figure out where stuff was and what I had read already.  I decided to put everything together on del.icio.us now.  Stuff I have read and want bookmarked will get thrown up there for everyone to see and stuff I have not have had a chance to read yet will get the clever toread tag on it.  If you are curious about stuff I am reading or going to read, feel free to follow them.

My wife has known this for awhile now, but I am now willing to publically admit it, I am addicted to typefaces.  The more and more I designed for the web, I began to notice how important the selection of typefaces, or fonts if you choose, was to a site.  I then watched Helvetica, a documentary about type throughout the 20th century, and I was hooked.  Now I notice type all over the place.  It is very easy to fall into this because type is all around you everyday.  Look at a road sign, an entrance to a resturant, various web pages or whatever, and you can start to notice trends.  You will see styles you like and others you don’t like.  If you get more interested in it, you will even find typefaces you prefer and start to remember the names of them, it is crazy.

The point of this post is that content is always king, but how that content is displayed is a close second.  You can write a great story, make a great web page, or make a clever sign, but all of that is supported by the choice of type you use.  If you are more curious about the subject, I would recommend checking out ilovetypography.com.  It is a great place to start out to learn about type and find other resources if you are so inclined.

I recently read Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke and found much of it compelling.  There were a number of ideas in the book that made me think about the way I design and how I could improve upon my designs.  Two things in general stuck out and after a couple of weeks, I have come to really like one of the ideas and dislike the other.  I will tackle the one I don’t like first.

Always Using Semantic Code

Semantic code is great.  For those of you not in the web business, it means not making up your own stuff for HTML that exists, i.e., don’t make a class called “heading”, using one of the HTML heading tags.  The book encourages the use of semantic code throughout your site.  If you have a grouping of pictures on a page, instead of putting them in a general container, but them in a list with each picture being a list item.  Then identify the list and each item on the list and use those IDs to style it in CSS.  With this method, the world of absolute positioning can open up to you and you can do some really inventive and cool designs, outside of the normal box model.

All of this is well and good if you are the one maintaining the site.  This starts to fall apart though when you have end users updating their site and have no knowledge or care of semantic code.  Tools like Contribute, Dreamweaver, etc, allow users to make new paragraphs, insert images, and make new lists.  This is all good and required, however it might not be what the designer intended.  With the power of absolute positioning comes the responsibility of making semantic HTML, and once something unintended is introduced, things can go haywire pretty darn quick with a design.  Because of this, a balance has to be struck between perfectly semantic code and something the end user can update easily.  If you are doing your own site, then I recommend going crazy with semantics, otherwise, just be reasonable.

Don’t Design For the Bare Minimum

When I started as a web designer with CSS, it was always my goal to make the site look the same in all browsers.  This sometimes meant some hacks to get some of the “not quite” supported features of CSS to work on all browsers at the time.  As time has progressed, different browsers still have differing levels of support for CSS.  Combining that with the evolution of CSS and you could make a huge chart of CSS selectors and the browsers they work in, and in fact some people have!  By designing for the lowest common denominator, a designer was restricted from the CSS available AND still had to deal with the nuances of each browser.

Clarke proposes different versions of a site for different browsers.  If a browser is supporting cool and new technologies, then why shouldn’t we take advantage of them.  This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t take other browsers into account, you still have to make your site look nice in Internet Explorer, but there is nothing to say that you can’t make your site look nicer in Firefox or Safari.  Yes this takes some extra planning, but as a designer you can play with new technology and encourage other people to use browsers so they can see the stuff that is possible with web standards.  On a side note to this, if you want to see what is possible with CSS3, check out an examples page in the latest update for Safari.

Overall, the book was fantastic.  It made me think about the way I am doing design and while I didn’t take everything from it, it was still worth checking out.  I know the next design for my blog will incorporate some of the new web standards and will also use a lot of semantic code, I just don’t think I can do the same with the HTML on a customer’s design.

Pick of the Week is my way of highlighting cool/new services and software on the web or the Mac. A few Windows applications might sneak in from time to time, but it will be rare. You can find an archive of services and software at http://www.marktopia.net/tag/potw/.

Getting in just before the end of the week due to family issues, this week I recommend the newly free NetNewsWire.  I did comment about NetNewsWire back on the Blogging Techniques post and at that point decided against it because of the $30 price and because of some issues with enclosed content.  With version 3.1, that was released this last week, the enclosed content issue was resolved AND it was made free.  These reasons by itself would have probably been enough to make it my pick, however some other changes have made it worth while as well.

First off, I have NEVER been one to like browsing web pages from RSS feeds from within my RSS reader.  NetNewsWire has changed that by doing a couple of things.  First off is a widescreen layout for browsing articles.  The second is the way the browser works from within the program.  When clicking on an article, NNW does not use tabs but instead provides the different windows down the right side of the reader.  It is a nice interface and works well.  Now I can take the same “workflow” for reading articles that I used with Google Reader and tabs in Firefox and do it all from within one program.

Another nice feature is the Clippings section.  Basically this works like a bookmarks section of your browser, but it allows you to save a headline or actual web page with it.  This basically makes it work like the Starred items in Google Reader but also integrates my bookmarks.   And if that wasn’t enough, I can post directly to del.icio.us from there, so you may see more (read any) posts on my account in the near future.

There are also a number of other great features that I am not mentioning here, such as the Combined View, posting to Twitterific, Smart Folders, etc.  All of these together make for a great piece of software and now that it is free, you really can’t go wrong.  Two last things I will mention are the NewsGatorOnline and FeedDemon for Windows. These are both products put out by NewsGator, the company that makes NetNewsWire, and both are also now free.  This makes one of the best Windows readers and the ability to read online and sync clients both free.  It is rather impressive to see a company put this software out for free and I can only imagine seeing the usage for all products increasing in the near future.

This seems like a few years ago when the IM “wars” were going on. Every other day it seemed that there was a new IM program on the block that was stealing the thunder from the big IM three (MSN, AIM, and Yahoo). To this day, the big 3 are still doing just fine and even a company like Google couldn’t dent it much. This is because once people chose a platform, they were unlikely to switch to a new one but they might sign for an account on it. Until the multichat clients came around, it was common to have 2-3 IM clients running at a given time. Well, I personally am interested in avoiding this problem with micro-blogging.

I now see a new “big 3″ in the micro-blogging taking control, Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. It is early enough in the game that some people havn’t made their final decision, so I am curious about what people are using and why they are using that instead of the others. My goal out of this post is to hopefully gather people onto one platform so they and myself only have one thing to monitor. Some things that would be nice is a client that I can install on my machine that doesn’t cost too much (or anything), isn’t too buggy and is not very resource intensive.

So have at it in the comments, which system do you/would you like to use and why?

Note: I know that Pownce and Jaiku are invite only right now, but as a member of both, I have enough invites to get people going and spreading them around, so don’t have that be an issue for this discussion, please.

I have been running the last developer’s release of Leopard for 3 days now.  It is basically feature complete but I have been waiting for the public release before blogging about what I like and don’t like with it.  I realize somethings might be different in the final release, but in general, the developer release and the public release are the same, so let’s get to the features.

Spaces - I didn’t think I would care about this at all.  I have tried to use virtual desktops with third party programs on Windows or built into Linux, and never got too far with them.  The two things that change that in Leopard are the navigation between spaces and the ability to always have an application open in a specific space.  This means that Mail can have it’s own space and stay all by itself while I browse in a different space.  It is very cool and going to be one of those unexpected great features.

Stacks - Again, a small part of the new Dock, but really neat.  The fan and block view look cool and the Downloads stack not only provides a single location for downloads but also organizes them for me.  I also added Applications to the dock as a Stack and that works well for launching programs.  I didn’t think it would replace Quicksilver, and it really doesn’t.  What does though is the upgraded Spotlight

Spotlight - Spotlight is my new application launcher.  It works as well as Quicksilver and the new Top Hit is accurate almost all the time.  Quicksilver, I loved you, but now the same functionality I used you for is in Spotlight.

Finder & Quick Look - The Cover Flow view is neat, but ends up being not that practical when going from folder to folder.  I imagine people will play with it, but stick with the 3-column view.  The impressive new feature is Quick Look.  From the Finder, the Space Bar opens a ton of files in a Quick Look view instantly.  Word, Excel, PowerPoint, music, movies, etc, all open up in the Quick Look view.  Quick Look also works from Mail so you can Quick Look attachments.  Very very cool stuff there.

Those are the biggies so far.  I havn’t tested Time Machine yet, that will have to wait for the home machine when that gets upgraded.  A couple odd things, wireless seems quirky.  I was on fine at work, but there are reports that the final release is having problems.  It also sometimes cannot find the home network, causing me to turn the radio off and back on to pick it up.

The other odd thing is that there is no rounded corners to the screen anymore.  As was typical from a CRT where the display could not fill the entire rectangular screen, previous versions of Mac OS X had rounded corners for the display.  Now the OS takes up the entire rectangle of my screen.  A very small thing, but interesting nonetheless.  If you have features you like or are curious about, feel free to comment and I can see what information/experiences I have with them.

I decided to really tackle the method of my blogging madness. After some thought, I decided that I had to analyze programs in a specific order as they will affect the next choices. For example, picking a RSS reader that doesn’t work with the blog editor would cause me to go back and check other blog editors. Because of this, I decided to tackle things in this order:

• Blog Editor
• RSS Reader
• Web Browser

This is also works because it is going from the limited to large audience applications so by picking a blog editor first, it should make choosing a browser easiest in the end, or so my thinking goes.

For those of you who don’t want to read everything, my final result is MarsEdit as a blogging program, Google Reader for RSS and Intel Optimized Firefox for browsing, with a curiosity for Flock as it evolves as a replacement for all of those programs.

Blogging Editors to Try

Evaluation Standard - Able to post to a WordPress 2.3 blog using keywords with minimal effort.

ecto3

This is still in alpha, so i will cut it some slack, however it is not handling keywords from wordpress 2.3 well. There is a keywords dialog box that I cannot get enabled correctly. It can post new keywords, but will not download keywords from posted items, so it runs into syncing problems. It does have a media browser to quickly add media from my machine to the blog though.

MarsEdit2

Nice simple interface and works perfectly with Wordpress 2.3 tags by changing one option. Post editing is quick, although the default view has HTML markup to clutter things. Flickr integration is a great feature as I am quickly able to access my pictures and add them to the blog post. Editing of posts is also done quickly and Growl integration caps things off. This is my editor of choice.

Readers to Try

Evaluation Standard - View all of my new items in a single view that is easy to navigate. Be able to star/flag items to read later. Be able to blog an entry from the reader.

Vienna

A simple but efficient RSS reader. Has a 3 paned view that shows all of the feeds in groups, then headlines, then each item. Can be configured to mark articles as read when clicking on the headline so using the arrow key, you can whip through unread articles fairly quickly. Many different reading styles, but the 3 pane view is the only view, so it is missing the combined view I like so much. It also supports flagging of articles, which I use quite a bit. It also does not support blog editors, so that is a bit of a drawback. Importing also worked, maintaining the folder structure correctly.

Google Reader

The web based reader of choice for many now, the addition of search has added this back onto the list for me. I like the combined view and it would be perfect except that it doesn’t have a great way of blogging about an item. The other drawback for Google Reader is that only Firefox can set it as the default reader, not Google Reader’s fault, but an issue to deal with. Flagging is done through the Star function and works as it should. Importing also maintained the folder structure without problem.

NetNewsWire3

Very Mac looking application with lots of options. The biggest issue is that when reading in the combined view, when hovering over an item, it does not mark it as read. This means that I have to use the keyboard to click up through each item. It also doesn’t like some enclosed media items, so that isn’t cool. It does have the ability to post to a blog easily and it interacts with MarsEdit very nicely, so it has that working for it. It is close, but just not there for me. It also has flagging and imported the folder structure as expected.

NewsFire

Another very Mac looking application, however it is also restricted by the viewing options. It did not import the groups for my feeds, but it does support them. It then displays everything in a headline view and when clicking on it, changes to that item’s view. This is the only way to mark an item as being read from the main view. Navigating between items is done with the space bar, so going through a lot of unread items means jamming on the space bar a lot. The program does support blog posting which worked with MarsEdit

Shrook

Shrook goes with a 4 pane view with the groups, then channels in each group, then each item in each channel and then finally the content of the item. This again cannot be edited, and marking items as being read is similar to Vienna where you have to arrow through each item. Flagging works just fine and blog posting with MarsEdit was a snap. The lack of a combined view does make it difficult to recommend though. Shrook also saves each item as it’s own file, so that can be a bit of a file hog.

endo

endo, made by the same guy making ecto, is a neat looking application, but it doesn’t do the combined view easily. It does allow blog posting easily. Everything revolves around groups of feeds that you have the headline view of and have to arrow through. The lack of other viewing options is disappointing, but the folder structure was adopted as endo groups, so that is good. Another thing to note is that the Applications Support folder for endo seems to create a file for each item adding up to lots of files.

Bloglines Beta

I shouldn’t give my final opinion on this, since is a beta product, however the basic feature set is there and it is still missing something. It does combined views for all articles and for groups kind of. The combined view groups all articles by feed, so I don’t get to see the newest item on top, I get to see the newest item from the top feed in alphabetical order. This seems like something that should be changeable, but I can’t find it. The other interesting view is the Quick View where you can see the 5 newest items for all your feeds, but there is no quick way to mark an article as being read without marking them all as read.

Browsers to Try

Evaluation Standard - Non-bloated (subjective of course) and has the Mac look and feel.

Firefox 2

Firefox has been my favorite browser for a long time. It has a minimal footprint where you get to add whatever you like into it and it renders standards compliant pages fairly well. It is also the only browser that supports Google Reader subscriptions out of the box. The biggest problem I have had lately is that Firefox has become sluggish and crashes often. Because of this, I am trying out:

Intel Optimized Firefox 2

Same old Firefox but optimized for Intel Macs. It picked up my Firefox profile just fine without having to change anything. It also found all of the plug-ins I have and has them working just fine also. More time will tell if it runs into the same issues as the normal version, but for now, this seems to be the winner.

Safari 3 Beta

Safari 3 is better, but still not perfect. The biggest issues are lack of plug-in options and that Google Reader doesn’t render quite right on it. There is also the minor issue that I like to use my address bar as a sort of temporary bookmark area where I can drop down a list of pages I have typed the address into, Safari does not have an easy way to access this. On the plus side, Safari 3 is very fast though in loading pages, noticeably faster than Firefox and Opera. Speed isn’t everything though, and it isn’t enough to make me use Safari.

Opera

Oh Opera, you try to do so much and end up falling short in so many areas. You have a built-in feed reader but have no option to change to a different reader. The interface is not very Mac-like and most of the “neat” features are just that, neat but don’t provide any real substance. It works as a browser, but all it’s extra stuff just bloats things up.

Camino

The simplest of all the browser, it has the basic features of pop-up blocking and feed detection, however you cannot use Google Reader as your default feed browser, so that is an issue. It also feels a little less polished than the other applications, but it is rather speedy compared to everything except for Safari. I would really put Camino in the same boat as Safari, it is great for people who like the usage of Safari, but want a Gecko browser.

The Wild Card

Flock

Always the wild card, Flock brings everything to the table with an RSS reader, blog editor and browser all in one. It also has other features, such as a web clipboard and media browsers which provide some interest. Up to 0.9 version, Flock has matured from their initial release, however releases are few and far between, which provides some hesitancy. Breaking down each section, we start with the blog editor.

The blog editor is very basic, allowing for posting and that is about it. It does support categories, but not the keyword feature in Wordpress 2.3. It also does not allow for editing old posts, but you can overwrite old posts with a new one. Not the most useful and the lack of keywords eliminates it from use as a blog editor, however it was interesting enough to have me check back on it when/if there is a 1.0 version.

The RSS reader is actually pretty nice. It has a great combined view that looks a lot like Google Reader in function. It allows you to save posts and blog posts directly from the built-in blog editor, which is cool. The biggest problem I have is that I cannot restrict it so it only shows unread items. If it had this feature, it would be very useable for my purposes. The only other concern I have is that with over 100 feeds, it seems to use quite a bit of memory and slowdown was noticeable.

The browser is basically Firefox with a fairly busy theme. This is done on purpose to allow quick access to the advanced features, but it also makes it look really busy. Because it is built on Firefox, it has many of the plug-ins that Firefox can install.

Additional Notes

In the course of writing this, I found some neat things out. The biggest one is a third party program called the Google Reader Notifier that runs in the menubar and lets you know when new items are available. The really nice feature of this is that it allows browsers other than Firefox to set Google Reader as the default feed reader, getting rid of one of my concerns about Safari and Camino. The other thing is that instead of blogging about a blog post from an RSS reader, the sharing ability of Google Reader might work best for gathering interesting posts by other people. This would be difficult to do with many RSS programs, so it ends up being another nice feature.

Final Outcome

First, this took a lot longer than I was expecting, mainly because I wanted to give each program a fair shake. I hate installing a program, giving it 3 minutes and deciding it is not for me. I like to think that I pushed each program to try and do what I wanted it to, and in the end, I am happy with my results. My biggest surprise is MarsEdit and how far it has come from the previous version. The second biggest surprise was that Flock was fairly close to accomplishing all of the tasks by itself.

I should also comment that I have attempted similar tasks like this before on this blog. This was the most comprehensive and the plan from now on is that I will evaluate new or updated tools as them come out, and then use the appropriate tag so it will be easy to find, for example, all of the blog editors I have reviewed. I will also keep a small area of the sidebar to keep track of the current tools I am using.

Today when I went to Amazon, I got a new look from the site. I am assuming this is slowly rolling out to users, but it is interesting. Here are a couple screen shots of the new site.

I have been meaning to do this post for a couple weeks but have not had it entirely fleshed out so I have been avoiding it. Since it is not getting any clearer or better thought out in my head, I am giving it a go. Basically there have been a number of Mac applications that I have grown fond of recently that fit a nice niche and most are free. I recommend checking out each of these apps as they have made my computing life easier.

Vienna - I have mentioned this in the past as my RSS reader. The application continues to be updated regularly and has the three top features I am looking for in an RSS reader, searching posts, viewing all unread and flagging posts. This gets me more than Google Reader has (GR is missing search) and keeps a nice backup on my machine. The one thing I am missing is being able to post to my blog about a post directly, but if that is major difference between a $30 program and a free one, I can handle the free one.

Ecto - Another one I have mentioned before, I am now using the version 3 alpha and it is looking great. The keywords worked without any problems and I have a local archive of posts from my blog. It is also nice to write a post and save it locally while I might not be connected to the Internet. It also has a cool new Amazon helper thing that allows for quick adding of Amazon links. Here is an example of what that looks like:

“Stephen King’s Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born” (Stephen King, Peter David, Robin Furth)

All in all, I am pretty impressed with ecto for allowing me to avoid the web interface with WordPress.

Miro - I like video podcasts but iTunes is not the best video podcast player. Luckily there is a program called Miro that works the way iTunes should. There are now over 2000 different programs to sign up for including some cool programming and science ones. The nice part is that it automatically expires old files and deletes them for you. The interface is wonderful and the switch to watching full screen is great as well. If you are interested in any sort of video casting, this is something you should check out.