Nick Bradbury

ANN: TopStyle 4.0 Final Release

Several months ago I announced that Stefan van As had taken over TopStyle and was hard at work on version 4.0.  Today I get to announce that the final release of TopStyle 4.0 is here – and it’s a whole lot better than even I anticipated.

Seriously, Stefan has done a great job turning the aging TopStyle 3.0 into a tool that I believe every Windows-based web author should own.  There’s a ton of new stuff in this release, including:

• Unicode support
• Live FTP editing
• Extensible toolbars
• Script insight for ASP (both JavaScript and VBScript), PHP and ColdFusion
• Live spelling
• CSS definition support for IE8, Firefox 3 and Safari 3
• IE8 document compatibility

My favorite new feature is probably the embedded WebKit preview which enables seeing how your site will look in Apple Safari, along with a very slick preview of how it will appear in an iPhone or iPod Touch:

Head over to the TopStyle 4 web site for complete details, including update pricing and trial version download.

ANTI-DISCLAIMER: I no longer earn anything from TopStyle sales, so I don’t benefit from gushing about the new release :)

A-Listers Are Late to the Stream

Lately the geekosphere has been buzzing about how RSS is being replaced by the real-time stream.  Instead of getting our information from syndicated blog feeds, we’re now getting it via streams from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, et al.

This isn’t new.  The only thing that’s new is that “A-list” bloggers are finally getting wise to it.

Outside the geekosphere, people have long relied on RSS to bring them a real-time stream.  But this stream doesn’t flow from Twitter or FriendFeed – it flows from the companies they work for and from the feeds they rely on to do their job.

Since introducing FeedDemon back in 2003, I’ve talked with countless people who are subscribed to feeds which tell them when their company (or a competitor) is mentioned anywhere on the web.  They’re subscribed to intranet feeds which let them know when a customer sends a complaint or compliment.  They rely on internal feeds to bring them the latest information about other projects going on inside their company, or tell them when an HR policy has changed or when an impromptu company-wide meeting is taking place.  More recently, they subscribe to SharePoint feeds which involve them in a real-time conversation with their co-workers.  Some of them even have feeds which alert them to the status of their web servers.

These people have relied on RSS-based real-time streams since the first day they used an RSS reader, and I count myself as one of these people.  For example, I’m subscribed to several feeds from NewsGator’s FogBugz server which are absolutely critical to me -  especially right after a product release – because they bring me error reports that customers send from FeedDemon.  If I get several similar error reports, I have to drop everything and focus on figuring out the problem so I can release a fix as soon as possible.

BTW, this is also why the river of news approach doesn’t work for everyone.  If you’re subscribed solely to feeds from popular blogs and web sites, a river of news is ideal – you get a flow of information that you can scan for stuff that looks interesting.  If you miss a story, no big deal – it’ll float by later if it’s important.

But if you’re also subscribed to feeds critical to your business, this approach is unacceptable.  You don’t want a flow of uncategorized, unprioritized information that combines articles from Boing Boing with items from your company’s internal feeds.  You need separation between the stuff you read for fun and the stuff you read because it’s critical to your job.

Download Size Still Matters

Is it just me, or has the size of downloadable software ballooned ridiculously over the past few years?

Call me old school, but this bothers me.  It’s like some developers assume their software is so damn good that it’s okay if it takes a long time for you to download it.  Their software is so fantastic that it deserves to occupy a ton of space on your hard drive.

Yes, I know, hard drive space is cheap, and high-speed internet is supposedly everywhere these days.  But that’s not the point. 

The point is this: if you’re a desktop developer, then your software has to compete with web applications.  You know, those applications that you run by simply typing a URL into the address bar?

Can you imagine typing www.google.com into your address bar and then waiting for a couple hundred megabytes to download before you could use it?  Can you imagine visiting a web site that required you to reboot your computer?  Or one that required you to install a ton of updates before you could visit it?  How popular do you think these sites would be?

If you’re a desktop developer, don’t make the mistake of thinking your software only competes against other bloated desktop applications.  It also has to compete with web applications that don’t require downloading anything. 

The days when you could get away with a 100+MB download just to try out your software are long gone.  You want to stay competitive?  Shrink your download and streamline your install.  Make the download so miniscule that trying it out is a no-brainer. 

PS: The latest FeedDemon 3.0 beta is a 3.4MB download :)

Is Your RSS Reader Broken?

Dare Obasanjo believes that RSS readers which are modeled after email clients are broken:

“…it seems to me that the way we think of RSS readers needs to fundamentally change. Presenting information as a news feed where the user isn’t pressured to read every item or feel like a failure is one way to move the needle on the user experience here.”

I couldn’t agree more.  The fact that FeedDemon’s Panic Button is one of its most popular features is a clear sign that information overload resulting from “RSS as email” is a problem among my customers.

It’s no secret that I regret designing the first version of FeedDemon to work like an email client, and every version since then has been an attempt to drag myself and my customers (some of them screaming and kicking) away from that model.  It’s been such a slow crawl out of that hole that I’ve often considered building something brand new instead of trying to morph FeedDemon into a tool that doesn’t make information consumption a chore.

But then I come to my senses, realize that I love being able to focus on FeedDemon, and get back to making it into the application it should be :)

So what do I think it should be?  I think an RSS reader should enable you to read individual feeds if that’s what you’re into, but at the same time it should sift through the noise and find the articles that interest you. 

Many services attempt to do that by aggregating the most popular articles around the web, but I’m not a fan of that approach since it brings you too much stuff you don’t care about (you might not, for example, care about Britney Spears regardless of whether everyone else does).  Instead, my approach has been to have FeedDemon pay attention to the stuff you’re paying attention to, and use that to locate the stuff that’s most relevant.

You can see this most clearly in features like “Popular Topics” (which shows you the most popular articles across all your feeds), and the new dashboard-like start page in FeedDemon 3.0.  If you’re unfamiliar with FeedDemon, or you’re not using the FeedDemon 3.0 Beta, here’s what they look like (click to enlarge):

  

These are the kinds of features I want to focus much more on in FeedDemon.  I want to eventually build a tool that automatically brings you the stuff that’s important to both you and the people you “follow” with as little effort from you as possible and without violating your privacy in the process.

In my mind the “RSS as email” approach has been dead for quite some time, and it’s been a while since I invested in email-like features.  The real question is whether long-time users of RSS readers are ready to give up how they’re used to consuming their feeds (?).