Nick Bradbury

Microsoft begins to care about the browser wars, again

As reported by Ars Technica, News.com and numerous other sources, Microsoft has appointed Dave Massey as a technical evangelist for Internet Explorer.

Windows XP Sp2 features improvements to IE (such as popup blocking), but this news suggests that more improvements are in the works. My hope (and the hope of countless other web developers) is that these improvements will include more standards-compliant CSS2 support, correct MIME handling and the ability to display alpha PNGs. Oh, and tabbed browsing would also be nice. Hmmm...sounds like I just described Firefox and Opera :)

FeedDemon is PC World's Editor's Pick

FeedDemon won PC World's editor's pick in their recent roundup of RSS readers, beating out NewsGator, Bloglines, Radio Userland and 15 other RSS readers.

I sort of announced this before, but had my head so buried in the release of FeedDemon 1.10 that I completely missed the fact that FeedDemon won the editor's pick (!). My wife refers to this as my "mad scientist" mode - I get so caught up in what I'm doing that I miss even the most glaringly obvious things.

To be honest, I'm usually not too excited by winning these product comparisons. More often than not, past reviews of my software have been written by people who wouldn't use it in the first place and don't know what problem it's trying to solve. This review, though, is different. It's obviously written by someone who knows about RSS and took their time to really test each product. So...I'm excited by this one :)

GIF LZW Compression Patent Expires

At long last, the LZW compression patent has expired. It expired in the US on June 20, 2003, but it didn't expire in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Japan until last week. I remember having to obtain a license to support GIF display in HomeSite, so I join the thousands of other license holders in celebrating the end of this patent.

FeedDemon Crack

Dave Winer and Evan Williams commented that the people who shout the loudest are often the ones who have no basis for their anger. I'm reminded of this fact by an email I received this morning. Here's a quote:

"Fix your piece of s--- program! I upgraded to FeedDemon 1.10 and it crashes with 'Win32 device error.' Did you even test this s---?"

I've actually received a number of emails (and one forum post) about this bug, but I have no plans to fix it. Why? Because the error message only appears if you upgrade a cracked version of FeedDemon 1.0. This is a deliberate error message that FeedDemon 1.10 displays when it detects that you upgraded from a specific cracked version of FeedDemon 1.0.

That's right, people who use a pirated version of FeedDemon are emailing me for support. It never ceases to amaze me when people not only steal from me, but also expect me to spend my time answering their questions. And more often than not, the email I've received about this problem reads like something a drunk teenager would write.

I've written about piracy before and I'm not planning to start another lengthy rant. But I do have a request for those who have justified their use of cracked versions of my work: don't ask for support. I support my family with sales of my software, and my life is affected - dramatically - by the existence of cracks. Please, if you're using a pirated version of my software, don't expect me to help you.

Proposed clarification for RSS 2.0 spec (revised)

Two weeks ago I mentioned a proposed clarification for the RSS 2.0 spec, and the proposal has since been revised. While I'm disappointed that the spec couldn't be re-worded to stipulate that the RSS 2.0 <description> element is always entity-encoded HTML, I'm glad that the link to the examples will remain.

Quite often I receive support questions from people asking why specific feeds don't look right in FeedDemon, and more often than not the problem is due to the feed author incorrectly encoding HTML entities. Being able to point to an "official" set of encoding examples will be a big help in these cases.

How Microsoft Lost the API War

Joel Spolsky's recent essay on Microsoft's API shift is a slam dunk. It's a long article (as blog posts go), but it's a must-read for developers.

Funny enough, I seriously considered moving my development to .NET by writing FeedDemon 1.0 in C#. The C# language itself is very nice, and .NET certainly makes some things a lot easier than Win32. But several existing RSS readers received poor reviews due to their .NET-related memory usage, and requiring the 20MB+ .NET runtime is suicide for most downloadable shareware apps. So, in the end I stuck with Delphi, which I'd used to create both TopStyle and HomeSite. Delphi creates standalone (ie: no runtime) Win32 executables, which for the moment makes it a better choice for shareware.

Oh, and I couldn't help but nod in agreement with this quote from Paul Graham:

"If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms...and if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft."

I'm a one-person shareware company, and I even have to worry about the looming threat of Microsoft entering the same market that my software targets.

Who's Seeding the Net With Spyware?

This PC World article describes how porn and warez sites earn money from distributing spyware (via John Dowdell).

The Storyteller

One of the best TV shows ever made is now on DVD.

Adoption Day

A heartfelt congratulations to Eric and Kat Meyer on their adoption of Carolyn. It's obvious from Eric's post that all three members of the Meyer family are lucky to have each other.

FeedDemon and the feed:// protocol

Among the additions in FeedDemon 1.10 is support for the feed protocol for hassle-free feed subscription. This new protocol simply involves using feed:// rather than http:// for feed URLs.

Now, I know some aren't happy with the existence of this new pseudo-protocol, but let's face it: subscribing to feeds is a huge pain right now and it's causing far too much confusion. Feed reading has left the phase where only techies do it, so relying on orange XML and RSS buttons that spew XML when clicked just doesn't cut it.

The feed protocol aims to simplify this mess so that clicking on a feed:// link enables quick subscription via the user's feed reader. I'm hoping more applications - and more web sites - support this protocol so that we can put the days of subscribing by URL copy/pasting behind us.

PS: Yes, I know we should be able to rely on MIME types for all of this, but MIME types don't work.