I’m a news junkie, and not the only one. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a working feedreader I’d unconditionally love.

First there was NetNewsWire. Nice, but didn’t feel quite right. Then came Shrook, with the great feature of ordering the feeds according to the latest entry. Rulers marking the time from the posting, 1 hour, 1 day etc. Very cool.

When Shrook 2 was announced, I was in heaven. The first version was already great, if not quite there, so I could hardly wait for the next revision, which seemed to promise me the moon. And what did I get? Blah. Squeesh. Bummer. A christmas tree.

Now the creators of Shrook didn’t obviously recognise that if people wanted to slice and dice and organize their feeds in what way ever, they would choose NNW. Putting all the features on earth in one product can make it great, but few can make the software simple, intuitive and super-powerful simultaneously. Shrook 2, unfortunately, failed miserably. Only looking at the interface makes me feel sick.

I don’t want four equally wide panes in a feed reader. I want a decent way to navigate between feeds and articles but the most important thing in the window is the article. In Shrook 2 this wasn’t anymore the case, so I looked elsewhere and found NewsFire.

NewsFire hits the market segment that other feedreader manufacturers seem to have totally forgotten: people who want a clean, lean, fast and intuitive way to read their news. I currently subscribe to about 75 feeds and the figure is increasing. There’s no way I can easily follow them with NNW’s static subscription order. You say organize them in folders. I say balderdash. I subscribe to a few mailing lists that Mail.app automatically filters in their own folders. I never read them. Out of sight, out of mind.

Dave Watanabe, the creator of NewsFire, seems to have an excellent sense of how my mind is working. The feeds are organized just like in the original Shrook (although the timeline rules are missing), so the most current feeds are always shown first. That’s the way it should be. Plus, the user interface is really simple in any way, so the app is a real joy to use.

So where’s the catch? It crashes. NewsFire and Quicksilver, two mighty good applications, seem to have two things in common. They are both ground-breakingly innovative and user-centered — and they both crash after 10 minutes to 2 hours after their launch. What really pushed me to find another solution until NewsFire matures (yes, I have reported the bug) was that when it crashes, NewsFire always loses the sense of which posts I have already read.

Today I downloaded both NetNewsWire 2 and PulpFiction, two apps that both have quite a few major proponents. Here’s a few quick observations:

NetNewsWire

• It now has in-built webkit so you don’t have to switch to safari to read the full posts.
• While many of the shortcomings in the 1.X have been addressed, the most important flaw to me, static order of the subcriptions in the left panel, is still there (as far as I can tell), making it an instant no-go for me.

PulpFiction

• The UI is clearly innovative, more post- than feed-centric, making it look more like Mail.app.
• The posts can be sorted by date, which is great (and natural), but it’s harder to keep track of whole feeds than with other readers.
• Because of the previous point, didn’t really click to me.

Anyone (Dave?), relieve me from my pains. Why does NewsFire crash? Why can’t any other of the players understand how the feeds should be served? Any products I’ve missed? Anyone? I’m sinking…

I’m proud to announce that we’ve released the version 1.0 of Simulation package for OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System).

The major part of the package was developed by the nice folks at Collaboraid and my job was to finish the project and to make minor modifications to the system to get it ready for launch.

The Simulation package was developed for and financed by Project RechtenOnline, a Dutch project to facilitate and improve virtual learning in law schools across the country.

I seem to have a tendency to find a hotel room right on the edge of an open wireless signal. Last time I was in Leiden my laptop could detect the signal by itself and keeping the Powerbook in right position meant unlimited surfing.

This time, in the same town but in another hotel, the situation is a bit worse. The hotel hasn’t yet finished its WiFi project so I had already given up on surfing when the owner of the hotel called me today. She told me that the guy living in a room below me had left a message this morning telling that he had surfed the whole night using an open signal.

I of course had to find the signal, too, and I found it strongest in the middle of the first floor aisle. I could stretch the signal all the way to the door of my room, but never quite to my room. Until I got the brilliant idea that if the signal is stronger in the first floor, it has to be at its strongest on my hotel room floor. Well, unfortunately the best coverage seems to on the floor of my closet, and I have to lie on the floor outside the closet with my hands inside. Not quite comparable with an Aeron chair, is it?

I’m proud to announce my first commercial Ruby on Rails project, which is AFAIK also the first ever in Finland. I will be developing a simple content management system for a firm in the fashion industry (whose name I cannot yet publish) that offers the firm an easy way to publish new product lines and product pages.

The system will allow them to connect products with as many product lines they want to. It will also contain an extranet with which they can inform their b2b clients about their stock situation.

I will start the project in the beginning of December and the system should be ready for launch before you open your New Year Veuve Cliquet’s.

I’ve now officially made my first purchase from iTunes Music Store. I bought the whole Rammstein album Reise, Reise. I would’ve liked to buy the physical album (since I bought the whole album anyway) but couldn’t find it from the Amsterdam airport. So I just grabbed it from iTMS. Convenient. Very convenient.

However, I still think the most of my iTMS öhases in the future will be individualögs. If I want the whole album, I also want the leaflets. And as the store has now landed in Finland, how about making some contracts with Finnish music producers? Wow, they got me, there already is some Finnish music. Not a whole lot, though, so it would certainly be an aspect where they could improve. And for christ’s sake, please don’t mix ö with o. If I search for songs from Yö, I really wouldn’t like to browse through all yo yo rap son

For some reason some files in my CVS checkout sometimes end up without write-permissions for myself. I can easily change them in emacs shell buffer, but if they’re already open in emacs, I still get <buffer is read-only> nags. Here’s how to get rid of that: meta x toggle-read-only or C-x C-q.

Thanks to Andrew Grumet and blighty at #openacs who helped me out with this.

When I for a few years ago was still in PC land, there was a neat little app called PGP. It uses a public key method to encrypt/decrypt mail messages. The problem with the app was that I never got around to coupling it well with a mail application. Besides, I never knew which messages I should sign or encrypt and which not, and these reasons together effectively made me not to use PGP at all.

Enter Mac world. I started getting mails with Signed tags on them. I checked the Mail.app help to find out how I could do the same. The cool thing was that OS X Mail has indeed built-in support for digital signatures and encrypting and provides a switch to encrypt a message when appropriate. Unfortunately, despite saying how easy things were, the help file never told how to get things up and running in the first place. The procedure for this isn’t hard, it just can’t be done inside Mail.app, so a step-by-step guide for getting a mail certificate working came in very handy.

Go ahead, check it out. I find this a very useful and cool feature of Mail.app that has for some reason been neglected by the Apple marketing (and help/tip writing) staff.

[UPDATE] The computer actually arrived in just one week. I guess we’re just one helluva lucky bunch of folks. Or then Apple has sorted out its shortage of capacity.[/UPDATE]

Just went and bought a new iMac for my parents this Monday. It’s the 17" model with superdrive and 512MB RAM.

I’m pretty excited, not just because it probably means a lot fewer unpaid pc support person hours for me :)

What puts me off a bit, though, is the shipping time of up to 8 weeks. Yeah, you heard it just right. I guess someone else is in the process of switching, too.

I’m writing this in Leiden, Netherlands, where I’ve been this week working on a simulation/virtual city project built on OpenACS. If you ever visit this city and stay at Hotel De Doelen, make sure your room is on the canalside. Not only are the rooms bigger, quieter and more comfortable (I stayed one night on the other side of the hotel), but someone also has an open wireless network that can just be reached with my PowerBook. It’s a two-years-old model with the plain non-extreme airport card, so it needs a bit better signal than newer laptops, but I still can get online by putting the computer real close to the outer wall.

I guess this is one of the upsides of very dense population. We’ll probably have to wait for some time in Finland, although the commercial wifi networks are getting some foothold in the bigger cities.

Apple opened its iTunes Music Store in Finland and a few other European countries yesterday. Other Nordic countries were still left cryin’ on the beach. The prices are the same as usual in Europe, €0.99 per song and €9.99 per album.

!images/20.gif (iTunes Music Store in Finland!)!