Lee Nau

Thanks, Larry Pruett. I think I’m starting to understand Design Patterns from the perspective of PHP. A lot of this is still kind of cryptic to me, but if I enter in the source code manually and examine it over and over again, perhaps it will prepare me for my project to read Design Patterns(book) by the Gang of Four. I want to see if I can figure out how to use the design patterns in Ruby and JavaScript as well.

The source examples in PHP, though, are great. I’m learning a lot, even just by typing the examples in and getting them to run. If only the left shift key worked better on this keyboard. Maybe I’d better dig around and find a better one.

Yesterday, Brent Simmons announced that NetNewsWire, my favorite RSS Reader, is being released for free download. Along with NetNewsWire, which won my RSS reader roundup a couple of months ago, NewsGator has released all their RSS readers for free.

It seems like an excellent time to update to NetNewsWire 3.1. Congratulations to Brent, Greg, and Nick. Well done, gentlemen.

The other day, Chanpori Rith started on 43 Folders with a really insightful post about The Seven Deadly Sins of Instant Messaging. One of the things that grabbed me was the following section from the fifth of the seven sins:

According to the Pareto principle, you spend 80 percent of your chat time with 20 percent of your buddies. Identify the buddies you don’t chat with anymore and delete them.

Recognizing this fact, I’ve spent some time going through email accounts and my instant messaging software. There’s something strangely cathartic about deleting contacts I chatted with on two occasions six years ago. I still have a gaggle of people in my list that I rarely, if ever, talk to, but about 50 accounts are gone now. None of these accounts belong to anyone I’ve typed a word to in the last year.

As a clutter bug, this is a first good step. Next, I’m going through thousands of email messages in several mail clients, a plethora of RSS items flagged in NetNewsWire or starred in Google Reader, and a ridiculous pile of bookmarked items in the six browsers on my computer.

If you’re a pack rat, building the habit of deletion can whet your appetite for disposing of physical stuff. Getting rid of crap I don’t use is part of my five year plan.

Is it part of yours?

I’ve been using Flock as one of my primary browsers for a while, but noticed a tendency of the software to crash at inopportune moments, particularly when I had a significant number of tabs open. Getting dumped with 25 tabs open (which are all awaiting tagging) is never fun.

I had high hopes for the new Flock 1.0, which I downloaded last week. I was looking forward to an increase in speed and an increase in stability. Unfortunately, it seems that the improvements to the browser are strictly cosmetic and/or social networking enhancements.

Without a basic level of stability, none of the extra social networking junk matters even a little bit. This afternoon, closing a tab containing Yahoo Mail crashed Flock about six times in a row. It very rarely closes without crashing. If I close the browser, it crashes. If I close a tab, it crashes. If I use the keyboard to command-number to a specific tab, it crashes.

I’m dissatisfied enough with the new Flock, despite the extra sleek myworld page, that I’m finished messing with it. I’ll export things I’ve bookmarked in the browser, but I need software that works, is reasonably fast, and doesn’t crash 80 times a day.

After a long time of realizing how much it sucks to back date entries in Wordpress (especially if you’re using the Firefox Expandable Form Fields extension) and trying to remember the passwords of a whole bunch of different blogs that are powered by various systems, I downloaded MarsEdit 2.0.3 last night just to check it out.

Yesterday’s Evaluating RSS Readers post was authored using this software. I added 50 Words to it and played around with it last night (which resulted in my staying up a little too late).

I have no idea how I got along without it. Occasionally, posting on blogs, particularly from my on-again-off-again wifi connection at home, is slow enough that it inspires me to put an entry in a Ta-da Lists to get around to the post later. With MarsEdit, I can save things as drafts, mess around with an entry or idea on the train.

I like that I can manage multiple blogs from one interface. I enjoy the fact that I can edit all the fields from this same interface and that I can tab to the month, date, and time in the date fields. The only thing that gives me pause is that I use the Textile 2 Plugin on one of my blogs and the post list doesn’t interpret those posts.

The inline Technorati tags are nifty and the fact that it’s scriptable means that if I’m ever terribly ambitious, I could write something amusing. Fortunately, other people have beat me to the punch.

See?

Currently playing in iTunes: Friday the 13th by Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins

I’m getting really tired of Google Reader, primarily due to its slowness and the way that it reacts to my keystrokes. The v key in Firefox-based browsers opens the item in a new tab. If I fill my browser (usually Flock — which I’ll likely replace) with tabs, Google Reader will occasionally refuse to continue opening tabs and give me the whole blocked popup guff. When this happens, even when I stop close all the tabs, it continues to refuse until I quit and restart the browser.

Since I use multiple old RSS readers as well as Sage, NetNewsWire, Flock’s built-in news reader. I thought I’d update my software, try a few new things out, and look around for Mac OS X RSS Readers.

The Candidates

NetNewsWire 3.0

NetNewsWire has updated from the Lite version I’d used before. There are multiple options for posting to del.icio.us, posting to a blog, handling podcasts, and reading feeds. It’s pretty easy to add feeds and categories. I like how fast it is and the interface is clean, if basic. It costs $29.95.

endo

endo has a unique interface that, quite frankly, befuddles me. It doesn’t look anything like any RSS feed reader I’ve ever seen. There doesn’t seem to be a way to save bookmarks to social bookmarking sites. It’s $17.95.

NewsFire

NewsFire is pretty, reminiscent of other useful little Mac OS X applications, like Unison or ColorSchemer. Key commands make it easy to bookmark things on social bookmarking sites. This one is $25.00.

Shrook

Shrook has a slightly unusual interface as well, but since it has no social bookmarking functionality, which I use heavily, it’s a no go. Its strange iTunes-esque interface is not something I could see myself useing very long.

Conclusions

I think NetNewsWire 3.0 has the broadest feature set, but NewsFire is a close second. Google Reader’s only advantages are its accessibility from a mobile browser and its GMail interface. All of the Mac RSS readers outperform the browser plugin and web-based solutions, both in speed and flexibility.