Nick Bradbury

FeedDemon to Sync with Google Reader?

Amit Agarwal has the scoop: I’ve been experimenting with making FeedDemon sync with Google Reader.  It’s something we get a lot of requests for, so we decided to see what it would entail to add Google Reader synching to both FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.

I should make it clear that it’s not 100% definite that this feature will see the light of day – it’s still in the experimental stage.  I sort of have an unwritten policy of not promising a feature until I’ve already coded it, and there’s a lot of coding left to do here :)

But assuming that Google Reading synching is added, I’m curious to know what specifically you would like to see.  Beyond the basics of synching (i.e.: ensuring that changes you make in Google Reader are reflected in FeedDemon, and vice versa), what could I do to make the integration more useful?

One thing I’ve added already is sharing – just click FeedDemon’s  “Share” icon to add an article to your Google Reader “Shared Items” page.  But I’m guessing there are some other features in Google Reader that I’m not aware of which could be really nice to take advantage of.

The Great Un-Friending of 2009

If we ever friended each other on Facebook, then there’s a good chance you’re annoyed with me right now for un-friending you.  But I swear it’s nothing personal.  Lemme ‘splain.

I’ve been on Facebook for a while but I never really used it – the UI felt clumsy and cluttered, and I just didn’t get the appeal.  But lately I keep running into people in the “real world” who swear by Facebook, so I decided I should take a second look at it.

BTW, when I say “real world,” I mean the world away from my computer and the small circle of geeks I cocoon myself in.  If you’re not familiar with that world, it’s worth a visit.  Nobody cares what OS you’re running, what browser you’re using, or whether your HTML validates.

Anyway…because I never used Facebook, I just blindly friended anyone and everyone.  Which now, of course, makes it such a noisy place that I can’t possibly spend any time there.  So I pared down my list of friends to a much smaller group of semi-related folks in the hopes that I’d better understand why so many people like Facebook.  And the first people to get cut were my geeky friends.

So, don’t take it personally if I un-friended you – it probably just means you’re a geek, in which case you should be following me on Twitter instead :)

Building a Better Twitter Feed Reader

Like many of you, I’m addicted to reading Twitter.  And not surprisingly, I’m also addicted to reading feeds.  So you’d think I’d love reading my Twitter feeds in FeedDemon, right?

Unfortunately, no.  The problem is that Twitter feeds are plain text – no hyperlinks, no images, no nothing.  As a result, reading Twitter feeds is a bland experience in any feed reader.  For example, here’s how an item in a Twitter feed looks in FeedDemon 2.x:

That’s a boring way to view a Twitter stream, so I’ve spruced things up in FeedDemon 3.0:

As you can see, there are a number of improvements.  First, URLs are automatically hyperlinked and benefit from the short URL preview feature I mentioned last week.  Author names and @replies are automatically hyperlinked as well so you can click to view that person’s Twitter stream.  I’ve also added hyperlinking of #hashtags – just click to go to a Twitter search page which shows all tweets with that same hashtag.  And since Twitter isn’t meant to be a read-only service, I’ve added a “Reply” icon to enable replying to a specific tweet.

Last but not least, I’ve also added profile pictures.  Unfortunately, you’ll only see them if the feed is in a folder that isn’t synchronized, and then only when you’re subscribed to the Atom version of the feed (they’re not included in the RSS version).  Hopefully the Twitter folks will make it possible to determine a user’s profile image from their username, since that would enable always showing the profile image.