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 always love big Apple events. They never do things quietly. Leading up to MacWorld every year there are rumors flying like crazy. Everyone is waiting with bated breath for what will come off of Steve’s lips. iPhone rumors have been flying for over a year and now it’s here.

This thing does it all. It’s an iPod, it’s a cell phone, it’s a camera. The thing has a wide touchscreen that automatically knows whether it should be in landscape or portrait mode. It runs OS X, so you can have real applications like Mail and Safari, not neutered ones. It has wifi, bluetooth, and EDGE: It’s always connected. It’s got a 5 hour battery life while doing video, photos, surfing, calls and 16 hours of just audio. It’s got 8GB (or 4GB) of storage. This thing is fricken amazing.

The problem; it cost’s $600 for the 8GB version and $500 for the 4GB version (prices with a 2 year contract) and you can only get it on Cingular. And not until June! Steve, you had me up to that.

The iPhone, it really does sound great, but I think they took a huge gamble by going exclusively with Cingular. People don’t like to be locked down like that. I predict they work something out with the other carriers within a year.

My big question after the MacWorld keynote was that’s it? I really want to see a large iPod like the iPhone. Touchscreen iPod with wifi and bluetooth? You could get rid of that big dock connector on the bottom and just add a charging port which could be mini-USB 2.0. Ahh…what could be.

If you didn’t notice Apple’s stock (APPL) took a 7+ points (roughly 8.5%) hike today. Damn! If I’d only had a spare $10k yesterday!

I found this while browsing the Interweb and it’s easy to install.

Are you bored of your current wordpress admin? Well, suffer no more with this nifty plugin. Steve Smith has elevate our visual pain by creating a plugin coded named “Tiger Admin” that helps to change the design or look and feel of the Wordpress admin page.

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This is from the blog of some woman who is dating an Apple developer. All I can keep saying is Yes! Yes! Yes! YES! I think this is the only girl who understands geeks/developers. Why can’t more girls be like this?

I date a geek and I thought I was the only one that had to face these sort of situations. If you’re a geek and you have a girlfriend let her in on the read. That’s what my bf did and after reading this, I was a lot more understandable about my bf and his need to be with the computer almost all waking hours that he isn’t with me.

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