Jared’s Blog

Last December, after making the switch to OS X, I began looking for equivalents to the normal set of applications I was using. After some poking around the interwebs, I was finding that the term “OS X freeware” to be a bit of an oxymoron.

Macheist to the rescue! If you’re unfamiliar with the event, go read up on Wikipedia. I was going to purchase TextMate for $50 anyway, might as well donate a bunch of that to charity and get a bunch of other apps as well.

One of the apps that came with Macheist happened to be NewsFire. While there was nothing wrong with Thunderbird, I decided to use Mail.app for my email which doesn’t have an RSS reader. Being that I just bought a shiny new RSS reader app in NewsFire, I gave it a shot.

It took just a couple of minutes to dump my most read feeds into NewsFire. The interface is gorgeous. After finding out you could simply flick through items by pressing spacebar, I was flying along. Then, I started running into all the things I missed about Thunderbird.

First of all, NewsFire doesn’t display the web page. It only shows you what the feed text. That’s OK a lot of times, but there many times where I would just read the entire article right from Thunderbird and if the site had commenting, I was also able to read them right there. Now it does pull down images and Flash (I believe it’ll also download enclosures like podcasts), but I want the full sit. I suspect that Thunderbird’s close ties to Firefox gives it this ability with little effort on the developers end. At the same time, I know WebKit (Safari) is able to be used by third-party applications, so this isn’t too far out of question.

In Thunderbird, it is not easy to do, but it is possible to view authenticated and https feeds. Really, all it involves is copying some files from a hidden Firefox directory, but it’s neither intuitive nor is it anything the average user would attempt. I can’t say the same for NewsFire; it doesn’t even have a dirty super-nerdy workaround. I can’t count the number of times that I ran into a situation where using an authenticated feed would’ve been useful.

In short, NewsFire is very well put together visually, but is still lacking some advanced features. Please David, update. All of your other apps have been updated recently, now it’s time for NewsFire.

I’m exhausted. It’s only Tuesday and I can hardly wait for the weekend to get here. Last weekend was the big move. On Friday, Rick’s parents came up to help with the move. The major reason they came was so that we could use the big trailer they had. Much easier than trying to take it all ourselves and much cheaper than renting a van.

About half of Friday was spent moving the non-essential boxes over to the new house. The second portion of the day, we painted. Leave it to me to procrastinate and not choose a color until the last minute. Considering that, I couldn’t be happier with the bold blue color I chose. It matches my comforter perfectly. At night, the room doesn’t glow through my eyelids like the white rooms I’ve lived in the past few years. We ended up doing 2 coats of paint because the paint wasn’t covering evenly enough with just one. It’s better to make it look right now than to live with it and hate it later.

On Saturday, while Rick’s mom and girlfriend tackled the rest of the painting, the boys, Rick, Rick’s dad, Karl, and I, headed back to grab the big stuff. I thought Friday was tiring, I had no idea how much Saturday was going to hurt. And it did. I woke up Sunday and was hardly able to move without feeling some sort of ache.

During all the commotion, I was somehow able to find a few minutes here and there to peek in on the Wild game Saturday night which they won by a score of 5-1. I was actually at the previous game which they also won. The team has looked fantastic in the final stretch of games this season. They’re playing well at the right time and they’re going to need to because their first round opponents are Anaheim. For those who are unfamiliar, Anaheim was the team everyone picked to win the Cup at the start of the season. They also have 2 of the best defensemen in Chris Pronger and Scott Niedermayer. Guigere isn’t too bad of a goalie either. The last time the Wild met the Ducks, they were swept and only managed 1 goal all series. Though, as Jacque Lemaire said, “03. 04, 05, 06, 07.” In other words, they were different teams back then. Still, the Wild are the underdogs and that means they’re going to have to work hard. That’s ok, I know my boys can do it and I like cheering for the underdog more than I like cheering for the favorite anyway.