www. cam mcbride .com

Sunday, August 28, 2005

News Gator can't do the basics

Going on Robert Scoble's recommendation I signed up for my News Gator (first time I've used the nofollow link option) account to allow me to continue working in Outlook when reading my RSS feeds and have all the flexibility of Outlook. (Eg Forward email, assign reminders and create tasks for RSS items). Another thing that attracted me to News Gator was that my reading information (read / unread items) would carry through to New Gator Online so that I could catch up anywhere.

It all was looking good for News Gator and me until I had two days off reading this week. When I fired up Outlook to start my reading I noticed a number of my favorite news feeds had only 10 items unread. I thought it was strange that a large number of these sites which usually have more then 10 items a day eg Slashdot and Bink.nu to be sitting at 10 unread items. So I went and visited a number of these sites to find that News Gator had just removed the older items and only showed the last 10 new items along with the unread items. (I'm guessing this was the feed size for that site) Now am I missing something here? The whole idea of me subscribing to these feeds is so that I can read every single article that is posted. Now that I have changed my work flow to accommodate News Gator it makes me extremely mad that I have to go back to my old reader and have a large gap of time that I can't get back between when I last updated to the current feed items.

It looks like News Gator is one of those good ideas, poor implementation services. I can’t wait for Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer to control the feed information as I see this as being the most important parts of RSS consumption. I will cancel my News Gator account today - so long News Gator.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Google Talk



www.google.com/talk

Wow, Google are trying to do everything these days. Over on my link blog I've linked to an article on the Download Squad with one of the very first reviews.

I can't wait to get my Prius II



Drive Video

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Google Releases Desktop 2

The big difference in this new version is a sidebarwhich goes on the side of your desktop and gives you access to your Gmail, news, weather, photos (not from Picasa, but folders and RSS feeds), stock quotes, RSS headlines (or Web Clips), a Scratch Pad (for quick note-taking) and a Quick View list for web pages and files you
use often.


http://desktop.google.com/

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Find answers fast

I found this “Fill in the blanks” post over on the Google blog. This is a fantastic way to find the answer to what you’re searching for. Just type [the parachute was invented by *] and your done.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Style Vista lets you adjust Vista's opacity & colours (colors)

This looks interesting. I suppose it could become useful when/if I get sick of the Aero Glass effect. ;-) Made by Stardock

Monday, August 01, 2005

Yahoo! Buys Konfabulator

I purcahsed this program around a year ago. It does require a bit of memory yet if you have the resources it's a must-have, and now FREE down from US $20.