Tag: netnewswire

Blogging, office 2.0, Photo Sharing, Podcast, PodLeaders, RSS, Web, Web 2.0

Your top Web 2.0 apps?

If we ignore the fact that the term Web 2.0 is controversial for all kinds of reasons and concentrate on the applications themselves, which Web 2.0 apps (using the broadest possible definition) do you use most?

I use:

  1. my blog and podcast software all the time (they are run out of WordPress)
  2. my Flickr account regularly to post photos
  3. Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets frequently for collaboration or sharing of documents
  4. Google’s Calendar to synch with my laptop and mobile phone calendars
  5. Technorati, PubSub and Google’s Blogsearch to subscribe to RSS searches
  6. Flock as my main browser of choice (primarily because of the Flickr and Del.icio.us integration) – I also use Firefox, Camino, Safari and IE7
  7. Feedburner to burn and track my feeds
  8. NetNewsWire, Google Reader and iTunes to consume my feed list
  9. TechMeme, Megite and TailRank for keeping up with tech news
  10. Del.icio.us very occasionally to store URLs for items I have found interesting

What cool Web 2.0 apps am I not using that I should be using? What are your favourite Web 2.0 apps?

RSS

NetNewsWire updated to 2.1

Via Chris Messina, I see that my feed reader of choice, NetNewsWire, has been updated to v2.1.

I downloaded the new version this morning and although I was downloading the beta’s as they rolled out, 2.1 seems to be a huge step forward.

The biggest issue I had with the latest beta (2.1b37) was that it seemed to hog the processor when downloading feeds – this appears to have been addressed in the released version.

The biggest step forward with this version is the ability to synch feeds. I run NetNewsWire on my laptop and desktop machines – with the synching, I can read my feeds on either and the read status is synch’d on both machines – wohoo!

Good job NewsGator!

Technology

NetNewsWire Beta – doesn't synch

I use NetNewsWire as my feed reader – I keep going back to it, despite its limitations because it is faster to read my feeds in a desktop app than a web app.

However, one real bugbear I have had with it is its lack of support for synching. I use two different computers – my desktop computer while in the office and my laptop while on the move. I want to have the feeds and their read status synched across my computers (without having to shell out for a .Mac account).

Bernard told me last night that the new beta of NetNewsWire is out and that it supports synching – wohoo!

However, my joy was shortlived on trying it out! There is a synching function in NetNewsWire 2.1b17 but it doesn’t allow you to synch across machines. It simply synchs your feed reader’s status to the web – this status can only be accessed by the same machine subsequently – so it is more like a read status backup than a synch.

Hopefully this is because the app is still in beta and this will be resolved someday soon!

RSS

FeedLounge's amazing disappearing feeds trick!

I signed up for a Feedlounge account today – why? Partly out of curiousity and partly ‘cos I’d really like to have some way to have my feeds synchronised across machines and FeedLounge, being an online aggregator, allows for that (and is filled with AJAXy goodness!). The $5 per month charge almost seemed worth it to save on the hassle of reading the same feeds again and again on different computers.

I exported my feeds from NetNewsWire (my desktop feed reader) into an OPML file and imported the feed into FeedLounge. However, what I didn’t count on was that FeedLounge would vastly speed up my feed reading (by making the majority of my feeds disappear!).

FeedLounge makes my feeds disappear!

In the image above you can see that the 471 unread items on my Blogroll have disappeared – not only that, but if I click on the 1713 Unread Items at the top, I see the same blank screen!

I must see if i can get my money back – you shouldn’t have to pay for products still in beta.

Now, has anyone figured how to synchronise NetNewsWire yet – I couldn’t figure it out last time I looked (I’m on NetNewsWire 2.0.1)

UPDATE:
Alex and Scott of FeedLounge contacted me in the comments and resolved the disappearing feeds problem.