Nick Bradbury

Tailrank 2.0

The new Tailrank looks great!  Kudos to Kevin Burton for the excellent upgrade.

Newspapers 2.1

When I designed FeedDemon 2.0 last year, one of my priorities was to completely overhaul how FeedDemon's newspapers work.  The first thing I wanted to do was to enable newspapers to be much more interactive, so that you could mark posts as read, flagged, deleted, etc., from within the newspaper.  That goal was accomplished, but I didn't meet my second goal, which was to split newspapers containing a large number of posts across several pages.

The main reason I wanted to do this was because FeedDemon has always been hampered by the single-page newspaper view.  Overall it worked fine, but things slowed to a crawl when displaying a newspaper containing hundreds of items.  This limited what I could do with the newspaper view, since any new feature I added had to scale to work when displaying hundreds of posts at once.

Well, I've been in mad scientist mode again this week, and I'm happy to report that FeedDemon's newspapers have been completely re-architected to support pagination [screenshot].  As a result, they're a lot faster and a lot more powerful.  The fact that I no longer have to worry about the performance cost of displaying hundreds of posts has enabled adding some long-needed features, including:

• Highlighting of keywords in watches and subscription searches [screenshot]
• Thumbnail images when showing summaries (excerpts) instead of full posts [screenshot]
• Quick +/- toggle between excerpt and full post [screenshot]

Within the next week we plan to release a beta of FeedDemon 2.1 which includes all of the features mentioned above.  Pagination is a much bigger change than it may sound, and I realize that change can be jarring, so I'm hoping that the improvements are well-received.  I'll announce the beta here when it's available.

Update: Critter has been privately testing the pagination features, and he says "the speed improvements are astonishing" :)

Google, YouTube and Copyright

Now that Google has acquired YouTube, is it safer to link to copyrighted content on YouTube?  For example, if I link to this excellent performance by The Who, does Google's purchase of YouTube make it more or less likely that this link will still exist a year from now?

Firefox 2 Kudos

I just installed Firefox 2 RC1, and was pleased to find how much better the feed handling is over Firefox 1.5.  For obvious reasons, I was never wild about how Firefox 1.5 didn't enable choosing an external feed reader when subscribing to a feed.  Firefox 2 gets it right and provides a simple way to choose your favorite feed reader.  Nice!

Crazy Poopin' Bird

I used to consider myself a nature lover, but that all changed when the crazy poopin' bird made my car his home.

It all started one summer morning two years ago when I found my car covered with bird droppings.  My car had been used by birds for target practice before, but never like this.  The sheer amount of stuff was worthy of an entire flock of birds - but I soon discovered it was the work of a just one crazy cardinal.

The cardinal (whom my kids have since nicknamed "Frenzy") hangs out on my car's side-view mirror, apparently under the belief that his reflection is another male competing for his space.  Rather than peck at the mirror, though, he tries to run off the intruder by regularly marking his territory.  A lot.

After putting up with this for a few weeks, I bought a rubber snake and wrapped it around the mirror, hoping to scare him off.  The next morning there was no sign of Frenzy's mischief - success!  But it didn't last.  A couple days later he started hanging out on the other mirror.  So I put a snake on that mirror, too, thinking that two snakes would send him packing for good.

It didn't work.  The next morning I came out to my car and found that he'd pooped on the snakes.

Then winter came around, and Frenzy disappeared.  Months went by, and there was no sign of him.  By springtime I'd almost forgotten about him, but he came back with a vengeance.  Apparently he'd spent the winter months at a buffet because he was more productive than ever.

So what can I do to get rid of this crazy bird?  I know that if I caught my neighbors pooping on my car, I'd shoot them.  But I can't bring myself to harm this bird.  He's simply doing what crazy birds do.  I just want him to do it somewhere else, that's all.

It's all in your head

Sometimes the best way to solve a programming problem is to get away from the computer.

See, I spent several hours yesterday struggling with a problem that just didn't want to be solved, and by the end of the day I was pretty frustrated.  I was trying to add pagination to FeedDemon's newspapers, which should have been simple, but it turned out to be trickier than I anticipated (it's a long story).

Finally I gave up, and decided to go work out to get my head away from the computer.  On the way to the gym the solution to the problem suddenly hit me - and I wasn't aware I was even thinking about it.  I sat in my car in the parking lot for a few minutes, then turned around and drove home.  When I sat down at my computer, the code flowed like it was just waiting to be typed.

I know several other developers who have had similar experiences.  We'll struggle for hours on something, only to find that the solution comes to us when we're doing something else (like sleeping).

Gillmor's Groove

Steve Gillmor has been on a tear lately, gesturing like a lucid madman as he writes some of his most coherent posts in ages. For example:

• To be continued
• Critical Mass
• iPlodius III
• and especially No Prisoners

Welcome back, Steve. Oh, and more Beatles' allusions, please.

Why did I avoid zefrank?

I admit it: despite being a geek myself, I tend to ignore anything that geeks are suddenly going crazy over. So when I kept hearing great things about The Show with zefrank, I did my usual contrarian thing and ignored it.

Wow, what a mistake that was.

Last night I gave in and watched a bunch of episodes, and holy crap is zefrank funny (and even poignant). I definitely have to make it easier to view stuff like this in FeedDemon.