October 2003 Archive
Archives
October 2003 Posts
Just a couple more days... If you didn't get the evite or you need directions let me know.
Photos from last year: http://www.dylangreene.com/browse.asp?folderid=248
16 photos
Microsoft architects Don Box (Indigo, the new web services engine) and Chris Anderson (Avalon, the new user interface engine) show off how much easier it is to build cool UI's using Avalon and XAML in Longhorn in this video which is actually pretty funny.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20031028LHORNDB/manifest.xml
Update (a few seconds later): They also demo the usage of Indigo. Web services in three lines or less... Very nice.
At work I'm using a Dell XPS. It came preinstalled with Windows XP Home Edition. I promptly installed over that Windows XP Professional Edition so I could have features like remote desktop access to my machine from home. What I did not know is that Dell's drivers don't automatically re-install the USB drivers correctly, so USB was not working.
After many reboots, bios tweaks, and chipset upgrades, I finally found the solution. (Dell's solution was to format the hard drive and reinstall Windows. Yeah right!)
- Press Windows Button & Pause/Break to go to the System Properties (or right click on My Computer and choose Properties, but the other way is more fun.)
- Choose Device Manager.
- Expand the Universal Serial Bus controllers section
- Right click and choose Properties of one that says something about PCI bridge (I forget the exact name and after you fix the problem, this item goes away. If you aren't sure, you try step 5 and 6 on all of the USB items in that list.)
- Click on the Driver Tab (it's kinda slow loading).
- If the driver information on top says "Not found" or "Not installed" then click Update Driver... and let it look for the driver itself (I didn't need the XP CD but that might be because I keep a copy of it on my hard drive just incase. You might need it, I don't know.)
- After it finds the driver, click Okay and USB should start working immediately - no reboots needed!
The new nokia game phone which hasn't been selling too well requires you hold it sideways when you want to use it as a phone. Not sure what a mean? Check out this site inspired by the unliked phone design: http://www.sidetalkin.com/
15 photos
Finally, for those of us not at the PDC, here are some photos of the Windows Longhorn Aero user interface.
The photos don't have descriptions, but you can make educated guesses:
- Move your mouse on the scroll bar and it shows a preview of what you'd see if you scrolled there.
- Shadows, "glass" borders (an effect that supposedly rivals simple alpha transparency when seen live), and the whole thing works via Remote Desktop.
- You've seen this for images, now any document's icon is a preview of the document's contents.
Here's a very short Aero video showing the glass effect.
It's alive!
Microsoft Windows Code-Named "Longhorn" SDK (Software Developer Kit)
And much more from MSDN...
You can now start developing Longhorn apps... years before it's released to the public. Be ready when the new OS comes out, you don't want to be left behind.
Screenshots of the next Visual Studio .NET (maybe called Visual Studio .NET 2004).
http://www.asp.net/whidbey/ScreenShots.aspx
These focus on new features for web developers. If I find screenshots of the other parts of the UI, I'll post them.
This article about Longhorn wraps up with a quote from yours truly.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2001775610_btmicrosoft27.html
What's new in Longhorn?
Here's some notes: http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/posts/33789.aspx
I just added some code to help block spam comments in my blog entries.
I did some research (looking at my IIS server logs) and found that a group or person is finding blogs via Google, probably with the intent of building a list of blog entries to sell, and another person or group is going through the URL's and posting the spam comments, which are typically a bunch of links to drug and porn sites. It was about four days between finding my site and the first spam entry. The Google search that I think was used was: "blogroll me" "post a comment" ??url (I don't know what the ??url is, probably posts in another language.)
I haven't done enough to see if the blogs are posted by a bot or a human. If they are posted by a bot, having a challenge question, such as showing a graphic of a word and asking the user to type that word in (the bot won't be able to read the word), will stop the bot from working.
What I do right now doesn't matter if it's a human or bot, but eventually the spam writers will figure out ways around my filters the same way they've figured out how to get around our email spam filters and I'll have to add Bayesian comment filtering.
You must check out this photo from Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) which starts this week. I've been to some good Microsoft keynotes, the Windows 2000 launch was one of my favorites, but nothing of this scale. Thousands of seats and 16 huge screens in one conference room.
More about this photo, thanks to Scoble:
To give you an idea of the scale of the keynote room, I went behind stage, and found an entire city of technicians, tons of computers, and video equipment. It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my decade of conference experience. Here's some facts:
1) There are 16 screens. Four, up front are are 22.5 feet by 30 feet. The rest are 15 feet by 20 feet. Each screen has two projectors. Each projector costs $125,000. There are 32 of them here. Each projector spits out 16,000 lumens. To put that in perspective, your standard office projector spits out 600 to 1000 lumens. So, each screen is about 20 times brighter than your average office projector. Each screen will be delivering up to 1900x1600 resolution (which is what we'll be showing Longhorn at).
They designed the entire hall to not have a bad seat. I just watched them practice the keynotes and my view in the back was just as good as in the front.
2) The audio system consists of 60 speakers driven by some bad-ass amps.
3) The power usage is amazing. There's more cables strung around back stage than you'll probably see on the Golden Gate Bridge. 400 amps for the audio. 300 amps for the projectors. Two separate 400 amp drops for the lighting.
The guy giving me the tour, Joe Kassel, tells me this is about the most technically difficult show that he's participated in.
For Louie and Sumeet, but anybody with a sore wrist from typing can appreciate:
I just had a nice interview with Kim Perterson of the Seattle Times asking if I'm excited about Longhorn and the PDC.
Heck, I'm not even going to the PDC and I'm excited.
I've posted many complaints about NewsGator on my blog, but that just shows that I'm most critical of those things I like the most (my real job is to make our software easier to use so I basically get paid to complain about our software). Every time I posted a complaint in my blog, Greg Reinacker, author of NewsGator, immediately posted a reply. This kind of attention kicks ass.
NewsGator brings the content you would normally use your web browser for into Outlook. It only shows you what is new to you. This saves me a lot of time because before NewsGator I would go to about 15 pages that I follow every few days to see if anything new was posted. Now NewsGator automatically collects what's new from each page in a easy-to-manage Outlook email format. Now follow more than 50 news sites, blogs, and other web sites because it's much easier to use Outlook to see what's new - like seeing when you have new email, the folder for each site with new content is bold, or I use Outlook 2003's Search Folders to make a virtual folder of just the new items.
NewsGator is not just for news. Greg also wrote a .NET-based program to do Event Log Monitoring in RSS. Instead of checking your Windows event log every few days for warnings, errors, or security issues, subscribe to the Event Log Feed. Never worry about going to the Event Log again because new events will show up in Outlook.
Does NewsGator work on all web sites?
No. Web sites need to support a "standard" called RSS. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is an XML file with the newest 10-20 items of interest. You will usually see a link labeled XML. With NewsGator, all you do is right-click on that XML link and choose "Subscribe in NewsGator" to add the feed. It's faster than adding a bookmark, plus Outlook's folders can be easier to manage than IE's bookmarks. On My site I have three RSS Feeds, all labeled with the XML icon: This blog, The blog comments, and the photo captions.
Why is this better than visiting the web site?
Offline news reading is easier and faster than trying to keep a copy of all those web sites you visit on your hard drive. In NewsGator you can forward any content item as if it's an email. You can also flag it, or post it right onto your own blog. It's much faster than web browsing. NewsGator gets just the content, no fluff, no ads, rarely any graphics. NewsGator by default checks for new content every hour. How much more on top of things do you want to be?
Why is this better than getting an email?
Since you poll only those feeds want and only when you want, there is no chance for spam. When you subscribe to a feed, the source of the feed doesn't know this, only your news feed reader does.
NewsGator Screenshots: http://www.newsgator.com/ScreenShots.aspx (Greg - how about some screens showing NewsGator in Outlook 2003 !)
Free NewsGator trial: http://www.newsgator.com/ (requires Outlook 2000 or newer, I doubt it works in Outlook Express)
By the way... this blog entry was posted from Outlook via NewsGator. It can post entries too.
Okay, I never post game release news, so you know this must be good. SSX 3, the sequel to the insane and over the top snowboarding games SSX and SSX Tricky, is now available.
Why am I looking forward to this game? SSX Tricky is my second most played game on XBOX (besides Halo, of course). While the graphics are only so-so for an XBOX game (because it's a Playstation 2 port and it's from EA), it's the game play that makes the game near perfect. It's not too hard to learn, it's always fun to play against somebody, and there's always new places on the maps to find and new tricks to randomly find. I still don't know what buttons do what, but I know how to do a Tricky Trick, how to grind the rails, how to land, and that's pretty all you need to know.
My younger brothers and sister play SSX Tricky whenever we're all home for the holidays, so I'm looking forward to getting them SSX 3 for Hanukah this year. I've gone snowboarding once before, and SSX is similar to real snowboarding in that you are on a snowboard and on a mountain side, but it goes so much futher that it's practially a new genre. Check out the videos below to see what I mean. You simply can't do what you can do in this game in real life. I'll go outside to play football or basketball, but I will not try these tricks in real life, and you will not find courses as creative as they are in this game anywhere in the world.
My one grip? EA is acting like a bratty little kid by not supporting XBOX Live and XSN. XBOX Live gives XBOX users easy online play against other gamers in your same skill level along with full duplex voice so you can talk against those you are playing. XSN is the XBOX Sports Network, it adds statitics tracking, leagues, ladders, competitions, and more. The Playstation version has online play, but it's the typical no-frills 1-on-1 Playstation style, not even close to what Live gives us.
SSX 3 Videos:
Clips: http://www.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ssx3_2.wmv
Long Trailer: http://www.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ssx3_3.wmv
Gameplay: http://www.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ssx3_peak1.wmv
Gameplay: http://www.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ssx3_peak2.wmv
Gameplay: http://www.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ssx3_peak3.wmv
Gameplay: http://www.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ssx3_halfpipe.wmv
Gameplay: http://www.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ssx3_allegra.wmv
Gameplay: http://www.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ssx3_elise.wmv
SSX 3 Reviews:
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/sports/ssx3/review.html
http://xbox.ign.com/articles/455/455455p1.html?fromint=1
SSX 3 Official web site:
http://www.easportsbig.com/games/ssx3/home.jsp
So go get SSX 3!
UPDATE: (Tuesday evening after buying the game)
Don't get SSX 3!
Well I bought SSX Tricky and I'm not happy. There were a few problems with the first and second SSX, such as the slow load times, slow interface, lack of multiplayer options, and so-so graphics.
And guess what... ...They didn't fix any of those problems with SSX 3.
The load times are much worse. The XBOX has a hard drive which games use to move data to from the DVD-ROM to speed up load times. Hard drive reading is much faster than loading off the DVD player. SSX 3 seems to cache some data to the hard drive the first time you play but after that doing something as minor as going to the menu requires a hefty load time.
The usability is far worse. Trying to be way to cleaver, you have to navigate the mountain to find the different events. What's' wrong with a menu? You can't see which ones you still have to do this way. Well there is a menu, but it's slow and painful to use too.
As a rule, since the XBOX has a built-in hard drive, all XBOX games should constantly be saving. For some reason (probably because it's a PS2 port), you must choose to save, at which time it asks what you want to name the save file (why, i have no idea), where you want to save it (the hard drive, duh!), and then asks Are you Sure, and reminds you not to turn off your XBOX while it is saving. THEN it asks are you sure you want to overwrite the save file already there. Then another message comes up telling you it saved, all which must be dismissed by pressing a button. This has been going on since SSX 1. Damn it, EA, just save the game constantly with the date and time as the filename. There's plenty of room on my HD.
The biggest problem with SSX 3 is that it's not SSX 3 Tricky. The two best features of SSX Tricky were the announcer Rahzel Brown and the rift from Run-DMC's It's Tricky when you completed a series of good tricks. There's no voice telling you what tricks you did, or other help, but there is an annoying voice telling you when you have new email (yes, the game sends you lame in-game emails which make AOL chatrooms look mature).
The biggest gimmick of this game is that you can supposedly race the entire mountain at once because all of the tracks are connected. I never saw the point to this, I personally like short and to the point tracks because otherwise my thumbs and wrist get sore. There are races that race the entire mountain, but they are long and boring. Plus it really sucks to loose your first-place standing on the last leg of a 15 minute race.
There's also annoying tie-ins with the Honda Element and 7UP such as Element posters in the game and 7UP snowboards that you can buy. If they are going to have any ads, they better be snowboard related. Why must every EA game have ads?
Finally, SSX 3 looses the famous voices (Macy Gray, Lucy Liu, David Arquette, Billy Zane, etc) adds crappy mainstream music such as old Chemical Brothers tracks, and ads a pointless money system so you can buy new clothes, sun glasses, trading cards, posters, and much more crap that has absolutely nothing to do with the game.
I don't know what happened to SSX. I blame EA, which continues to develop for the lowest common denominator (the four-year-old Playstation 2), and then deliver mediocre ports to the XBOX.
I'll still play it, and I might change my mind. I didn't like SSX Tricky as much as SSX at first because of how much more complicated it got, and SSX3 is 10x more complicated than the first two.
We'll see. All I know is that's a good trick!
Today I use NewsGator to track about 60 feeds. It's much faster to read a bunch of feeds via Outlook rather than visit all 60 web pages several times a day to see what's updated. Since each entry from each blog is a treated like an email, I can use Outlook's folders, filtering, and searching to basically give me my what is basically my own micro-Internet - an offline copy of only the content I'm interested in. However, this nice little world, which is fed by the XML-based standard called RSS, is deficient in one way: All I see is the original post, but none of the feedback and comments, or even a counter to show me the existence of feedback.
Without the comments feedback blog entries have substance but no life.
My blog entry on fixing Windows Update in August has almost 100 comments, a new comment posted almost every day since I posted the blog entry. A entry I posted about my theories about the Matrix five months ago still gets comments added every so often. Microsoft's Windows Longhorn Evangelist Robert Scoble has a great blog that exposes ideas and insight from within Microsoft, but only half of the story resides in the blog entries - the real content is often in the comments from his readers to of which he seems to have the uncanny ability to respond to practically every comment posted. (Go ahead, try it.)
My conspiracy theory as to why RSS does not support comments is that Dave Winer, Radio Userland's former CEO and founder and author of the RSS specification, did not think comments were important enough to be part of the RSS. It shouldn't be a surprise that, without using a third-party tool such as HaloScan, Radio Userland does not support comments.
RSS is now maintained by the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where David Winer happens to be working now. So.... Dave - How about RSS support for Comment Tracking?
Some ideas for what this tracking specification will give us:
- If I post a comment, I often want to see what others post after me. Track those comments.
- A blog entry with lots of comments I'm more likely to read than one with no comments. To me the number of comments signify the weight (or popularity) of the blog entry. Show me comment count for every blog entry.
- A blog with lots of comments I don't want to read through all of the old comments every time just to see the new ones. But maybe some people would like to have those old ones available as reminders for the way the conversation was going. Keep track of what comments I've already looked at.
- Today I can't keep track of who writes the comments. Did I see that person before? I wish I could tell. I'd like to see who is showing up in the comments I read across many different blogs. Who do I always agree or disagree with? Can I track their comments even on blogs that I don't normally read? Can I have the ability to block comments from certain annoying users? User tracking.
- When somebody posts a blog entry, and many other people reference it, should I post my comment on the original site, the site where I saw it the content, or all of the sites? When everybody posted about the Red vs Blue PDC video, I had no idea where the best place would be to post my comments. A "pingback" or "trackback" might help me find the original blog entry, but how about linking comments together from all of the blogs so I don't need to jump around? I don't really care which site posted the blog entry. Shared comments across blogs.
- I should be able to read, post, and track comments from the same software that I use to read blog entries (such as NewsGator). (Plus - I need my spell checker.) Public XML interface for 3rd party software.
There's much more.... enough to fill a whole specification. Who wants to help me write and promote it?
iTunes for Windows has been getting a lot of press today. And for what? Apple didn't follow the Windows Look and Feel Guidelines, or their own OS X Guidelines, instead going for their new pseudo steel look which probably looks cool to everybody who's still into chroming every part of their engine.
From NeemaNet Daily:
I don't know much about Mac software so when I saw iTunes released for Windows, I got excited. I've been using iTunes for Windows for 5 minutes. It's crashed 3 times. This is the most frustrating thing ever. It can't seem to add the mp3s from My Music. Firstly, they 'bundled' QuickTime with iTunes and installed the shortcut on my desktop. Then, they have this iPodService.exe running all the time when I don't even have an iPod. Then, the thing crashes while adding MP3s but on the next start, it doesn't know about the ones it added BEFORE the crash. Then, it's reconfigured my mp3s to be played with iTunes when I love Winamp2. Go Apple, you suck.
There is no pattern to its crashing behavior - I can't fix the problem because its crashing at seemingly random times. It runs one time and processes an mp3 fine then crashes the next time I run it on the same mp3.
Read on: http://neemanet.com/blog/archives/001276.html
Other comments: http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/posts/32313.aspx
iTunes Exploits Musicians: http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/ (kinda funny)
So how can Apple call iTunes The Best Windows App Ever?
Thanks, Craig, for sending this great usability humor site.
Microsoft was rewarded the IDEA (Industrial Design Excellence Award) Gold Award for a prototype interface Microsoft call's the MS Center for Information Work, or MSCIW (the name didn't win any prizes). Here's what the new user interface looks like. Yes, it's a bit large for your current screen, but check out what they envision your new monitor to look like. I don't know if this will be what Longhorn will look like, but it's probably a step in this direction.
As somebody who is very out of sight - out of mind (probably my ADD), this desktop would be great. For most people I expect the first thoughts to be cluttered and overbearing. Well hopefully it's customizable, because that much information isn't going to fit on any laptop screen anytime soon.
The other products that won are also pretty cool looking, and unlike Microsoft's user interface, many of them are available now.
I don't know how or why, but this site gets a lot of visitors... over 1000 every day. The highest I've seen it is in the 5,500 range. I've added a small counter to the sidebar that shows how many people are browsing this site at the same time you are. As I write this, there are 111 other people out there looking at my site. Hi everybody!
How do so many people find this site? Mostly through Google, which ranks me pretty high. I think this is because of a web site I started in 1994 called Dylan Greene's Windows 95 Starting Pages. Between 1994 and 1997 it was one of the most popular sites on the web. There weren't many to choose from back then, and it was one of the few with a lot of links and help for the strange new operating system from Microsoft, Windows 95. Even Microsoft didn't have much of a web presence back then.
Anyway, a couple thousand other web sites linked back to my site, from people's home pages to Netscape, which pointed to my site when you looked up help for Windows 95. Back then there were no search engines. Yahoo was run by two college kids and it had only recently transitioned from a mailing list to a web site. Besides porn sites (seems like they have always existed), there was no such thing as ads on web pages. My site was one of the original sites Doubleclick paid to put ads on, and that whole concept of being paid for my site seemed incredibly strange -- especially when I starting getting checks for $5,000/month to my dorm room. I was the only one I knew of in my dorm with a crappy university-provided desk outfitted with a nice leather chair, which still use today.
Many of the pages that linked to my Windows 95 page have since been abandoned but they are still online, so their links to Dylan95.com live on, boosting my GoogleRank. According to Google, over 1,200 sites still link to Dylan Greene's Windows 95 Starting Pages.
For the links here, I used Archive.org, which keeps copies of old web sites. It only has copies of web sites back 1996, two years after I started my Windows 95 site.
webMethods, where I am in charge of Usability & Design, announced three acquisitions today: The Dante Group, portal technology formally known as DataChannel, and The Mind Electric.
Something cool to me... I'm not the only webMethods blogger (that I know of) anymore: Our new CTO Graham Glass has a blog. Graham was the founder and CEO of The Mind Electric. Subscribed.
I hear rumors that the final Star Wars prequel will be titled Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, based on the fact that Lucas recently bought the internet domains.
I still say Yoda is on the Dark Side, and that he needs Anakin to go to the Dark Side to help with the balance. The whole idea of Dark = Bad and Light = Good is a fallacy, as (I believe) there are good people that are on both the Dark and Light side of the force.
For example, the in original three movies, we cheer for the Rebels as they destroy the Empire. What we don't think about is that the Rebels are terrorist, fighting against a government system they do not like, possibly killing thousands of innocent government employees when destroying the Death Star.
Well, if you read my blog regularly then you know I'm full of crazy ideas.
There's a show on BBC2 called The Office. I went from not hearing anything about it to hearing that it's so funny Steven Spielberg wants to make a movie based on it, even though none of us Yankees have seen this yet on our tube. If it's so good, I might have to pick up a copy of the first series on DVD.
Note: I am not talking about the incredibly funny cult classic Office Space.
4 photos
Last night I added XML-RPC support to my still unnamed blogging system that you are looking at now. This morning I added support for the Blogger, Metaweblog, and Moveable Type API. So what's the best blog posting software that I should be using? I don't care if it's web based, Windows-based, a plug-in for IE or Outlook, or it runs on my PocketPC, but it absolutely positively must have a spell checker.
I posted this entry using NewsGator, but it formats the font as Arial by default which I don't want, and has limited WYSIWYG-based HTML editing (basically whatever Outlook 2003 can do). Outlook 2003 still doesn't do the red wavy underline when you misspell words. This Best MSWord Feature Ever should be in every Microsoft application by now, also also in HTML-based forms.
Has anybody noticed that Google is now watching what you click on in the results? When you search for Dylan Greene, instead of http://www.Dylan95.com as the first result, the first result is now http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.dylan95.com/&e=7421. At least my Incoming Links page can still figure out the title of the pages - most of my visitors come from my high rankings in Google.
If I could request one security feature for the upcoming Windows Longhorn, it would be this:
Automatic OS-Level Application Sandboxing.
What does this mean?
1) When you install an application, you choose where to install it. The program you've installed can read and write files only in that directory. If needed, it can request access to other directories, such as My Documents, but it cannot do this without your permission. My MP3 player should have access to my MP3 files, not my entire hard drive.
2) Applications today get full read and write access to the Windows Registry. I propose giving write access only to the applications own section. It can have read and write access to other sections via public API, such as for adding file type associations, that way any changes can be easily tracked and undone.
3) Applications wishing to have Internet access must register themselves in a list of Internet-aware applications. From this list I can see which applications are using the Internet, disable access to any particular program, and see the internet addresses that each program is connecting to and receiving connections from. Programs should also have limits on what addresses they can connect to. An antivirus update program should only have access to connect to the virus update site, not any web site in the world.
4) Only programs installed via Windows Update should have access to the Windows directories. This black box approach will help prevent unstable Windows installations caused by 3rd party programs.
5) Legacy applications that can't be sandboxed with this model must give the user warnings and register themselves in a list of unsafe programs.
The point of this OS-Level Application Sandboxing is to make it impossible for Spyware and Adware to exist. A good side effect is that it will make many virus attacks more difficult. Ideally most of this is transparent to the user. This will also prevent programs like Real Audio from altering Windows Media Player codex and settings without user permission.
This is something I thought of over the weekend. This is not necessarily part of Longhorn. If it is part of Longhorn, it will a coincidence or maybe even because somebody on the team read this and thought it was a good idea.
See the little icon next to the title of each blog entry? I borrowed those from Deviantart, an awesome site for computer art. I'd like something very simple that identifies blog entries and something different for photo albums. Pencil and a camera? Paper and a photo? Circle and a square? I don't know, use your imagination and wow me. Email me or post links to your suggestions in the comments here. Best submission will be rewarded.
I've been stuck on this bug for way too long:
I have a stored procedure that is just a simple query. When I try to write out certain ntext values more than once, nothing happens after the first time.
response.write g_rs(blogText)
Foo (correct output)
response.write g_rs(blogText)
(nothing is returned, inncorrect output)
In addition, if I write out certain other values before blogText, blogText is empty the first time I look at it.
response.write g_rs(commentCount)
14 (correct output)
response.write g_rs(blogText)
(nothing is returned, inncorrect output)
Why is this happening? If I don't use a stored procedure it works fine.
I'm adding new features right now. Things might look funny until I'm done. Normally I'd do the work on a test site and then copy the changes over, but I don't mind the risk of messing something up. The danger involved makes me work faster.
My second batch of NewsGator comments (because I'm picky about the software I use).
1) Why does the "Checking for Feed Updates" pop up in front of everything? I'm typing away and then this intrusive window comes into my view. Maybe it's because I'm in Outlook at the moment, but it shouldn't matter. Make that window go away forever. Let me bring it up when news is downloading incase I want to see if something isn't working.
2) Outlook 2003 is slow now. Open a new email and I have to watch the icons on my desktop repaint and then outlook repaint. Why oh why... Don't tell me it's Outlook. It's not. It ran fine until I installed NewsGator. I've restarted NewsGator but not my PC.
3) There's so much crap being RSS'ed! I subscribed to News.com, and they put out something new every few hours. I want a filter, and I don't want to be required to make a specific search folder for each RSS feed.
4) I love how easy it is to subscribe. I would do it all the time, but I hate the "Newsfeed added. [OK]" dialog. Just add it and stop bothering me with pointless dialogs. If you really want to show some status, do a Windows Messenger/Outlook2003-style status window above the tray notification area (a fading window that fades out without requring any user intervention.)
5) I sometimes forget if I've subscribed or not. I like that it tells me that I already have, but it really should be a Messenger/Outlook2003-style status window too. Or even better the Right-click menu option should say "Already subscribed."
6) RSS gives me no way to follow comments. Every so often I respond to people's postings by adding a comment. Now how can I see if somebody has replied to my comment? I could spawn a whole trail of conversations that I might have no idea about. Maybe NewsGator could add this feature.
7) Content in NewsGator is ugly. I know I wrote this before, but I'm finding myself scanning RSS content now rather than reading because I can't wait to get to something nicer. NewsGator could at least default to some nice fonts.
8) Can I export NewsGator's rss subscription list as OPML?
9) The web site says NewsGator does Newsgroups too... Where/how?
10) Is MS going to build this into Outlook 2004?
Batch 1 of my NewsGator comments.
I know it's early (aka pre-PDC), but there's already so much buzz around Microsoft Longhorn, why not have something informative on Microsoft.com for when users search for the word Longhorn?
A paragraph to say that Longhorn is the code name of the next major version of Windows and that nothing else is public until PDC would be something.
Links to the Longhorn developers who are blogging would add a nice human touch the normally monolithic Windows releases that appear to come from some Metropolis-style machine rather than hundreds of intelligent people from all over the world.
NewsGator is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook that downloads RSS news feeds in Outlook. I use Outlook 2003 almost constantly, and I've read about a lot of other people finding NewsGator useful, so I gave it a try. This is the first RSS news aggregator I've used.
Conclusion...
I like the concept. I don't like the implementation.
My reasons:
1) Some prolific bloggers like Scoble and Winer have over a dozen entries a day. I don't want to have to click on each and every entry to read them. The view that NewsGator has that collects all of the entries in one page is cluttered and confusing.
2) RSS is made for machines, not humans. The view NewsGator (and any other RSS News Aggregator) is plain and boring. Limited formatting, no number of comments, and often not even a link for comments.
3) Less personal. All entries look the same. No nice personal look from good web design.
Maybe somebody could invent RSS-Human for readable blog entries with a human touch?
(Ironically, Jeremy Allaire proposed RSS-Data today. How about a human touch Jeremy?)