Antisocial networking

Monday, April 13, 2009

I’ve decided to terminate my Twitter account with extreme prejudice. I just find it disturbingly inane to the point of being creepy. I cannot communicate anything I would want to let anybody else know in 140 characters, and the people I’ve been “following” are not telling me anything interesting either. I also really can’t get why it’s a good idea to be “followed” by total strangers.

I’m not hiding from anybody. My email address is easy enough to find, and this website should give you a good indication of the value of my thoughts…

Unfortunately I need to keep an eye on Facebook for professional reasons, but please don’t try to engage with me there. You’ll be wasting your time.

Too pretty for its own good

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

So I decided to cough up for this year’s MacHeist bundle. Since there was at least two applications I wanted anyway (LittleSnapper and iSale) I was basically getting over 10 other quality applications for free. Some of them looked interesting, some less so.

The first one I tried was the radical new RSS reader, Times.  Times is a complete departure on the RSS reader paradigm. It presents pages, where feeds can be assembled in such a way as to look like a newspaper page. Here, for example, is a page with 3 feeds from Iceland:

Pretty, isn’t it ?

Unfortunately, that’s about all it is.  At a very basic level, Times is a nice idea. However, the user interface, in my opinion, crosses the boundary between inventive and non-standard too far. The process for managing feeds becomes tedious very quickly. The gratuitous “inner pages” on the left margin of the window might be ok if they were somehow functional, but they’re not.  The page idea would be great if the layout could be customised, but apart from some minor scope for resizing areas, it can’t be.

Page content (from feeds that is) is retrieved, where possible, but there is no way to read or respond to comments without exiting to the default web browser.

And, sadly, it is also fairly sluggish and unstable.

So, nice try, but no banana. For a moment it makes NetNewsWire look pretty tired, but the huge imbalance of style over functionality ends up making it look like one of those applications that give Macs a bad name.

(Oh yeah, obviously, it’s Mac only)

Twitter Guilt

Friday, April 03, 2009

Every now and then I get messages telling me that somebody is following me on Twitter. Sometimes it’s obvious link bait. But not often - usually the somebody seems to be a real person, who for some totally baffling reason wants to know what’s going on over here (very little, if you believe Twitter).

I suppose I should actually write something to satisfy my (slowly) growing audience, but what exactly ? Well, at least it gives me something to blog about. Maybe if I twitter about my blog I’ll solve both problems. Then I can blog about it!

It would be nice if you could send a short message when you start following someone, to say “hi”, and say why you’re following them…

iBlogger part 2

Well, I eventually managed to get it to work. The trick was to download ecto, the desktop blog editor from the same publisher, figure out how that communicates with Expression Engine, and apply the results to iBlogger. Result: success.

The main issue seems that I was stuck in a “this is how Mars Edit works” mindset. iBlogger (and Ecto) works differently. Not better, just differently, although actually in this particular case, it is better.

The only thing I still can’t get working is categories.

So now I can blog from my iPhone. If only I had something interesting to talk about…