NewsFire flaws

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I recently switched over to NewsFire as my feed reader, after becoming increasingly annoyed with the performance problems and ‘open source feel’ of Vienna. While the experience has been largely positive, there are a number of bugs and annoying aspects that I wish to document.

Visual

• Mandatory colour bubbles on groups: I dislike colour bubbles. I never use them in the Finder and rarely them in Transmission. Presumably the idea is to help reduce visual clutter for some people, but I am not in this population. Please make it optional.
• Fade-in on launch, fade-out on quit: Completely unnecessary.
• Hover colour in headline view: Somehow I never get lost in iTunes.
• ‘New’ badge: The contrast difference between read and unread is sufficient.
• Greyed group title bar: I’m really not sure what the deal is here. It’s good to grey when the application’s not in use, but doing it when the pane’s not active?

Bugs/design flaws

• Visual glitches: Not entirely uncommon.
• OPML: There are two major problems here. First, there’s not clear how to ‘select’ feeds when I’m presented with the import box. Something like a checkbox would make the process clearer. Second, and more infuriatingly, opening an OPML file that contains existing feeds will blank said feeds, even if the import is canceled. Re-importing a large number of feeds can have [drastic results].

Cities as Musical Whirlpools

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A post over at City of Sound explores why music scenes are a phenomenon unique to cities. In a digital age where one can do anything almost anywhere, one might expect a massive decentralised scene to emerge. While this does happen in a small way, cities still form musical eddies.

Really, it all comes down to the fact that humans are, by and large, very social creatures. The immediacy of feedback and rapport in a city simply can’t hope to be matched in a small town.

What MobileMe Means for You

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Today, among a number of other things, Apple announced MobileMe—a service based around the idea of personal ‘cloud computing’. In essence, the idea is that any time one updates certain information—email, photos, addressbook, &c.—at one machine, it will be updated almost instantaneously for all the user’s devices.

MobileMe’s foundations come from .Mac, which offered the ability to use Apple’s servers to store and sync personal data. Over the past four years or so, .Mac had come to be seen as outdated and over-priced, with customers hoping each year that an overhaul would be announced, but to no avail.

Hints of interest in cloud storage came with the Macworld 2008 announcements of the ‘Back to My Mac’ service (remote access and syncing) and the ability to push videos between devices. Much of the discussion revolved around the AppleTV and the MacBook Air, but I felt that there was something deeper going on.

The iPhone is really the motivator for much of this direction, in my opinion. MobileMe is generally about easy access and instant propagation, yes, but at the core it’s about being able to use the iPhone as a ultra-mobile computer that can call people. Digital media, contacts, email, data storage, and native applications—everything about the iPhone centres on the idea of the cell phone being subservient to the user.

However: Apple is far from being first with any of this. Cloud computing? Google’s entire application suite depends on it, and offers most of the functionality. Microsoft produce the only significant competitor in the category, Exchange (which, in fact, Apple are licensing to pull in business users). Dropbox are just one of the companies offering instant personal file syncronisation. There’s been a fair amount of movement towards cloud computing over the past year, too.

Apple differs from these others due to how completeness of the service. It has Google’s web-based data access; Microsoft’s automatic syncing; Dropbox’s file management; it works equally well with desktop computers, the web, and—most importantly—the iPhone.

I think this is part of why ‘Mac’ was missing from the WWDC banners—the iPhone is a major part of Apple’s plans, and OS Ⅹ is more about users than hardware.

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