Geek3

^{RSS readers are still all the rage, however some publications would much rather reserve the majority of their content for their website.}

Publications like Cnet, opt for breadcrumb paragraphs summarising the story but then force you to fire up a browser to view the content in its entirety, clearly in an attempt to boost advertisement revenue, and for those of us who like a customized streamlined experience, this is a bit of a nightmare.

I can completely understand that these publications need to make money to survive. Some have opted the way of the pay wall while others will only allow complete articles to be fed through their own applications, but there could well be a better way to do it.

I’m of two minds over what I’m about to suggest. I’m quite anti-DRM as DRM only punishes the users who actually pay for the content legitimately, however a common ground for all content to be delivered is one which many users (proven by the massive success of google reader and the many applications which implement its API) crave.

Services like Feedly’s partner program, and Google’s AdSense for feeds do allow publishers to claim some revenue if the user never hits the website but advertisements can be hit and miss, a premium RSS service would allow the necessary evil of a requirement for payment for content to exist in a world where users fight for more control on how their content is delivered.

Whether anything like this ever happens is of course another thing. This is just an idea which came out of my frustrations of having to swap from my feed reader into a different web session in order to read articles.

I should mention that both Feedly and Reeder implement a service which will go to the website and fetch the content from the article, this implementation is very good, however some publications have systems in place to prevent this form of scraping, and this isn’t a very solid way forward as since it’s not fixing the problem of publications getting remittance for their work, they’ll still work hard to stop it.

Mike.

Having recently made the move away from my Mac Mini/OSX, back to Windows, there are a few reasons I’m pretty glad to have moved back:

Parity

Windows 7 in work. Windows 7 at home. I use the same keyboard, and the same mouse both in the house and in work, and now I use the same OS. I expect to get a speed increase when using the computer because of this.

Home Key

I can use the home and end keys again! Woo!! (Yes. I know there are shortcut equivalent’s in OSX, I just having dedicated keys for them, I use them quite allot).

Windows live essentials.

There just isn’t an application like Windows live writer for Mac. It’s the only blogging application you can paste photos into, and it’ll take care of the uploading/embedding for you.

Also, Live Mail > Mail.app.

Mostly it’s Familiarity

I’ve spent more than half my life* working/fighting with and using Windows. OSX is a very very nice operating system, and although hardware cost was a massive factor in my defection I don’t think there’s that much lacking between the two of them (yes there are features each one does better, but at the core of it, since Microsoft got their backsides into gear, they both run pretty damn well) but Windows offers me a familiarity that would take years for me to build up with OSX.

*Yes. Ok I’m 21, Half my life isn’t exactly massive, but I first start messing with computers at around 7, so Windows 3.1 was my first Windows OS. Not that I could do anything worth talking about, but you have to start somewhere.. right?

Final Note / Pre-empting retaliatory feedback from Mac users (specifically @robelkin).

I’m not saying OSX is bad. Or even that Windows is better, this is just a list of reasons I’m happy to be on Windows again. 

Also having a Core i5 Processor in a laptop, for just over £500 is a massive bonus too

One of the biggest problems with Android currently is the market place.

Several major problems surrounding android and app distribution:

The Marketplace app itself.
It’s fugly. It’s clunky, and it’s fairly badly organized.

No junk filter
No apple-esque application review process means an awful lot of crap makes its way into the market, for example: Here is an application which tells you if it’s Friday or not along with displaying a picture of Rebecca Black’s face.

The current app store application count is greatly inflated by such clutter, which also makes finding decent applications a bit of a problem.

I would suggest that the lack of a $99 developer account might come into it, and I’m sure it does, but I don’t think for a second Google should start charging.

Easy pirating
The open nature of the platform makes pirating easier than on iOS. I have no personal insight into developing applications for Android, or trying to pirate a bought application to distribute it, however it goes without saying that on a platform where you can install anything from anywhere without hacking, pirating also becomes more of an issue, and this seems to be a commonly felt issue.

Again, this is one which is presented on the majority of platforms, but it is a one-up that apple currently has over android.

Split markets
People have long been debating how the fragmentation of the android platform was going to cause all sorts of problems. While currently it doesn’t seem to have caused much of a problem (bar lagging updates) a new collection of issues may well be created by market fragmentation, with Amazon releasing their own app store recently.

This will mean that Google will now have to compete on it’s own platform to ensure its own application market remains on top.

The Solution

Let someone else fix it.

No. Seriously.

If Google opened the market place platform up (Properly. An API exists, but it doesn’t go far enough, it merely returns application information, you can’t process payments through it) application developers could develop market applications using the existing repository.

It’s a fairly simple idea, however by allowing developers to innovate and create a much more enjoyable environment in which to purchase apps (along with adding proper ranking systems for fishing clutter applications published by inexperienced developers using free tools merely to hijack the back of a trend), it either forces the commercial application vendors to innovate more, or it retains the leadership of the open marketplace, both of which are good for users.

Just a though. There are many pros and cons to this approach, however the current marketplace needs a shakeup, Android is a wonderful platform, and thanks to Google’s rapid development, it’s becoming more and more polished as time goes on, this is just one area that’s pretty far behind in the game.

If you’re a user of Google Reader then you seriously need to try Feedly.

For a long time now I’ve been looking for either a web based, or software based solution for reading my Google Reader content without actually using the Google Reader home page (which is well though out and practical, but boring, and not how good media should be displayed).

Recently I stumbled upon Feedly. Feedly does a similar job to the flipbook app for the iPad, only through your web browser, and Android/iPhone.

Feedly downloads a plugin into your FireFox but it’s all accessed through feedly.com. Groups feel much more substantial in Feedly (even though they work more or less like reader) because feedly does a much smoother job of aggregating the content, each group of feeds feels like a website dedicated to that particular subject.

Feedly has also more of less done away with the dreaded unread feed count (again adding to the feel of it being a high quality publication rather than aggregated content) which is a breath of fresh air, since it gets rid of that unnecessary guilt when you log in after a few days, and find you have 1000+ unread feeds.

The android app also happens to be the highest quality Google Reader app for Android (it’s actually how I found the service). And although there are a few things I’d change, I adore it, and I haven’t found myself using any publications app since I discovered it.

Either ways, I’m smitten. I actually do use Feedly every day as my main source of content, whereas previously I’d always intended to use Google reader but found it to be far too much of a chore.

Once again Microsoft’s crack squad of advertisers have managed to create an advert which makes very little sense.

In the video, the women, clearly frustrated at the lack of obedience from her family, turns to Microsoft for the solution.

Magically, the application seems to utilise the power of cloud computing to not only implement the most accurate facial recognition ever, but then manipulate the image into something totally different, from a magical undefined source.

The American advert is almost the same, just with Americans.

Oh, and don’t forget Australia. Mate.

So, not only does the advert not make sense.. but they made it three times.

I think Microsoft just needs to return to their advertising of yester-year.

The strangest thing is that bar some memory usage problems with the new Windows Live Messenger, the Windows Live 2011 suite of applications are awesome, especially since they’re free, and (barring messenger) contain no ads.

So why they need to exaggerate features just doesn’t make any sense.

Or maybe, deep inside I just feel that nothing really compares to Steve Ballmer’s magically excited performance in that Windows 1.0 Advert.