Stu Smith: Making It Up As I Go Along
“ My life working for BinaryComponents, coding, design, and other stuff. ”
Although most of the graphics in FeedGhost are professionally produced, sometimes you need a quick and easy image editor to use in-house, for example for annotating screenshots. Today, my favourite image editor has been updated with the final missing feature I've wanted for ages.
For those who aren't aware of it, Paint.NET is a free image editor for Windows. It's fast, robust, and has the full feature-set for image editing, although I'm guessing it's not aimed at image creation.
I won't go through the full feature set, but for myself the most important features are:
Of course that barely scratches the surface of what it can do, but I only use an image editor for certain tasks.
Happily I can now uninstall "The Gimp" editor, which I only used for gradient fills. (Note to the people who code that package: #1 'Gimp' is probably the utter worst name you could have picked, really, who wants to type that into their search engine, and; #2 A 25-second splash-screen time is way, way, way too slow. For comparison, FeedGhost takes 7 seconds on the same machine and I wish I could reduce that.)
I think the best way of summing up Paint.NET is: it may be free, but I just donated to it. Superb.
Grumble #1: When I'm donating via PayPal, why do I have to enter the amount before I choose my country? My eye is naturally drawn to the country drop-down, but if you change this first, you get an error: "Please enter an amount greater than zero". Methinks PayPal is tested in the US.
Grumble #2: Why do so many payment sites have separate boxes for first and last name for your name "as it appears on your card"? My card has initials on it -- which box do they go in? Freeform data-entry would be so much nicer.
Grumble #3: In fact, why is PayPal so awkward to use for a non-logged-in user? I hate webpages that re-load when you change the value in a drop-down, stopping you from typing ahead, and I hate the fact that they don't warn me that I have cookies disabled (telling me that I haven't entered their CAPTCHA correctly is rather misleading).
...cat feet that is. Our new arrival is a 12-year-old male called "Jess" (we didn't name him). He's a little nervous at the moment as he's spent the past three months at the rescue centre after his previous owner died, but as you can see he's found it within himself to start sleeping in awkward places straight off the bat.
I know the phrase "browser extensions" (or even worse, "browser toolbars") makes most techies shudder, but well-written ones can be useful -- it's the bad ones, the ones that can't be removed or do nasty things in the background, that have given them a bad name.
Any extensions we provide follow two basic rules:
With the exception of the Firefox add-on (which may be removed via the normal Firefox Add-ons dialog), any browser extensions can be removed by going to the 'Integration' tab of the options dialog and clicking the appropriate 'Remove' button.
In the current version of FeedGhost only Internet Explorer extensions are available, and only for subscribing to feeds. In the next version we're extended that to cover the tagging functionality, and to support Firefox.
Because IE6 isn't RSS-aware, and IE7 only really gives one point of RSS extension (the Windows RSS Platform, which we hope to support at some point in the future), we add a right-click menu item for locating or subscribing to feeds. This simply launches FeedGhost and passes in the URI. In the next version of FeedGhost, we've extended this with an additional menu item for tagging the current page.
Options for adding and removing Internet Explorer links are available in the installer, and in the options dialog.
Firefox has great support for both RSS and extensibility. In our next release version of FeedGhost we provide two methods for integrating with Firefox, a simple one and a more complex one.
The simple method just sets FeedGhost as your preferred feed reader. This may be set from the installer, and also may be set or unset in the options dialog. This allows you to simply click the little orange RSS icon in Firefox's address bar to subscribe to that feed in FeedGhost.
The more complex method uses a Firefox add-on (or extension) to add a right-click menu item for tagging pages, as well as setting the preferred feed reader. This extension will not be installed by default; instead we will provide links from the application and the download page. We will be submitting this extension to addons.mozilla.org as soon as the new version of FeedGhost is available, so hopefully the extension will be available shortly after that.
This is probably the least useful extension now that most browsers are RSS-aware, but we include it for completeness. In fact, starting from the next version you will have to explicitly add support for this one via the options dialog. Setting this extension will associate FeedGhost with .RSS and .ATOM file types, so if your browser simply runs these files instead of recognizing them, they will still work. FeedGhost will attempt to discover the website that the feed came from, and subscribe to the feed.
(I just couldn't finish this post properly. Apologies if it's a bit dry, but I wanted to get it out of my drafts folder).
FeedGhost is out of beta now, our latest web feature is nearing completion, and we have a really stable version of the application ready for release. What are we going to be doing next?
We've barely done any promotion of FeedGhost so far. This has been intentional; we wanted feedback to find out any issues or major missing features before we started properly. We've had some fantastic feedback and bug reports, and the big missing feature was tagging. Now that's pretty much done, we're ready to start a big promotion push. This is new territory for us, so it'll be a definite learning experience.
Every crash report that is sent, every forum post, every web contact message, and even every blog comment is logged and notifications are sent to us. We either fix them on the spot, or more commonly, add them to our issue-tracking tool (BugTracker.Net). I had a little count up today and found:
(If any non-programmers are feeling uneasy that we have a released version with known bugs in, this article by Joel Spolsky is probably the one to read).
We've had some superb comments and feature requests, and we will get round to implementing them. They are all logged in a database so we never forget them. It's just that what with promoting and major features, they only get about one-third of our time.
FeedGhost is now a competent blog-reader, but it can go further. We've got a huge list of potential new features and directions we could go in. Blog writing? Web or mobile version? Social and community features? Affiliate scheme? It's all up for grabs. Your grabs.
Well as you can see I'm not in Rome today but back at home. Unfortunately my flight was cancelled due to the extreme winds we're suffering at the moment, and the next available one would be Saturday -- not much point when I was due to return on Monday. All in all I spent three hours driving, one hopefully waiting and two queuing for bags and information.
Em's on her way home as we speak having managed to grab an early flight back to the UK, and a friend has booked us a table at Nico's Il Ristorante for tomorrow so we can pretend we're in Italy.
Oh and congratulations to the guy at the boarding gate who was shouting at the staff for not using their 'initiative' (his word) to get the planes flying -- you made a bad situation worse.
I'm off to Rome tomorrow to meet up with Em after her conference; we'll be back late Monday evening. I'll be out of email contact until then (although mobile should work) but if you have any urgent questions or problems Lee should be able to help you out.
Ciao!
We've got some pretty cool features coming out shortly which will start FeedGhost moving on the path from blog reading to blog writing, but I thought I'd mention some of the little things I've been working on in the past week.
One question I get asked a lot is, "why should I use FeedGhost when X is available for free?". My answers are: one - wait and see, the reader application is just the beginning; and two - if you want the ultimate polished reading experience, a web-based application doesn't always cut it.
So without further ado, here's some of those little polishes that will be available in the next build (hopefully in the next week or two).
For those users who have small-screen devices, or just know the keyboard shortcuts, I've added a full-screen mode (F11), plus the ability to shrink the toolbar buttons (right-click or options dialog). The screenshot below shows FeedGhost running at 800x600.
We've felt for a while that the search box on the toolbar was a little odd, so it's now a button which opens the search tab. This now displays results as you type.
FeedGhost shows which subscriptions are being updated, and which are queued to be updated, on the tree via green and blue overlays. If like me you work with the tree collapsed, it isn't easy to tell how much longer updating will take. I've added a little status area to the tree which counts down the updates. This then disappears once all subscriptions have been updated.
I like the appearance of FeedGhost -- well, I would, it's my baby -- but not everyone does. In the interests of fairness, here's a couple of disagreeing voices I found on an article I found on Mike Dimmick's Bleurgh; I've posted a comment. Please feel free to add your opinions: is our visual appearance a gimmick, or does it work in the context of FeedGhost? Vote now!
Mike Dimmick's Bleurgh: How to misuse the Office 2007 Ribbon
Posts of mine that (hopefully) explain some of the design and testing process:
Don't worry, this is a technical post, it's not about some sort of personal smelliness problem.
There's a whole bunch of really useful services associated with blogging out there, and every now and again I find one that I'd really like to get FeedGhost working with. We only have limited development resources, so if I find something that will give both us and our customers an easy feature for not too much effort then I'm going for it.
The first such was Technorati. Before we made betas of FeedGhost available to the public, our search facility was much more functional: it would return matches from articles you've read, as it does now, but it would also make use of the Technorati web API to return matches for any old articles or blogs available on the web, with a quick "subscribe" button to add them to your subscriptions. We got it all working nicely with a single-user trial licence key, and contacted Technorati explaining the feature and asking to discuss a multi-user licence key.
The second, more recently, was coComment. This is a really nice service that lets you track comments you've posted to blogs in a centralized way. I thought it would be nice to add coComment support to our blog pages, but didn't want to impose the extra controls on non-coComment users, so I asked if there was a way to only show it to registered users. I had some other comments as well so I included those.
Unfortunately, it looks like these companies don't want to chat. They both have web contact forms -- no reply there. With Technorati we really wanted to include the search feature so we tried contacting their 'developers' email and tracked down a couple of email addresses for the management team -- again nothing. Fair enough we're probably too small for them to bother with but how about a polite "thanks but we're not interested" email?
So unfortunately you, as a user, don't have the lovely Technorati search we coded and don't have support for coComment; and I, at FeedGhost, am beginning to think that maybe the blogging industry is no different to any other: mouth wide open, hands over ears.
Yep, they are on my browser, and why shouldn't they be? So which muppet at Microsoft decided that the entire Office website should be off-limits to me?
My favourite line is near the end, "To learn how to accept cookies...". They might as well have said "To learn how to accept a crappy spyware-infested no-privacy browsing experience, just take the pills and continue using our products."
If we can manage to write a website that gracefully degrades with reduced browser features, surely Microsoft can?
OK, I'm calm now. Rant over.