Feedly is what Reader wanted to be when it grew up, but never had the chance to become.

Yes, it’s that good.

Just in case anyone out there reading this is thinking “Google What?” – here’s the skinny.  If you find yourself reading a lot of websites on a regular basis, constantly checking back to keep up to date with the latest, you REALLY want a feed reader like this.  With something like this, you can treat them all as if you were browsing articles in a newspaper or magazine, either slavishly reading every one or, as I do, cherry picking what most piques your interest from the stream (or firehose as we geeks like to refer to it

Things I love about Feedly:

• Keyboard commands for everything – I’m a mouse hater from way back.  Force me to click at your peril
• Multiple views – I can either view my stream the good old fashioned way like Reader used to do – just a big old list of text headlines, or like a newspaper with photos front and center.
• A ‘Must Read’ setting for the 1% of blogs I really don’t want to miss a single post from.
• A truly superb mobile app! Can’t overstate how important this is.  The iPad and iPhone apps are optimized for that format, yet as feature-ful as the desktop.  Major win! (Reader sucked at this, using it on the go was paaaainful.).
• Laziness – if you already use Reader as I did, all your feeds import seamlessly into Feedly, and while Reader still breathes, Feedly keeps it up to date so there’s zero risk in giving it a try.
• OK I know I already mentioned the mobile experience but the iPhone app deserves special mention, it makes it *so* easy to browse my feeds on the go, marking articles I actually want to read in-depth for later perusal via one of my other faves, Pocket.

Seriously, mad props to the folks at Feedly for evolving the state of the art, giving me a seamless migration path, and generally taking an OK but generally pretty lackluster experience and elevating it to joy.

(And no, I’m not being paid by these guys, I’m just wild about the product.)

I have nothing but admiration for them and gratitude for three great years during which I helped re-elect the first African-American president, helped fight for equal marriage, and make the world a better place by doing my usual job pushing bits around.  How cool is that?

One upshot of this is that I’m no longer bound by the company’s social media policy.  I understand why it exists and even agree with it as far as that goes.  When you’re working for the president of the united states, it’s probably not so good if your minions start shooting their mouths off about him.

The good news for me is that now I can say whatever I want Not that I plan to go off half cocked and unleash raging venom on the world – I’m a huge fan of the Obama administration and believe in a lot of what they stand for.

But nobody’s perfect, and neither is he or his administration. I will write more about this as I collect my thoughts, but just off the top of my head:

• I would love to see his administration take a hard-line stance on decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level.
• I think there’s a tremendous amount of tension in our society right now around spending and fiscal reform.  While I am in no way shape or form suggesting that Obama should become a shill for the Tea Party (god forbid!) I think he should take advantage of his second term presidency to make some hard decisions that will make hard liners on both sides cringe but are for the good of the country.
• I think we need to take a long hard look at the war on terror and the erosion of our civil rights that’s been happening in its name.  America is one of the greatest nations in the world and I would hate to see us lose such an important facet of our national identity in exchange for perceived safety.
• He has made a big deal about support for equal marriage during this most recent campaign – let’s see him put his money where his mouth is and enact reforms that would allow same-sex couples to travel to other states without fear (This is very tricky with regards to states rights, but I think it’s important to get this right.)

That’s all for now.  Pardon the slightly rambling nature of these bullets, I feel like each one could be a post in its own right.

It’s awful.  They made the window small, and right justified it.  I feel like I have to crane my neck at an unnatural angle in order to see what I’m writing, and worse yet, they’ve turned my good old message composition interface into something akin to a web forum or chat window.

This is NOT what I’m looking for in my email user experience.

A few months back, Google also did a full on revamp of the GMail UI that utterly convinced me they have an unrelenting hatred of the visually impaired. The entire screen looked as if it had been bleached of color and life, and the contrast was so low I could literally barely read it at all.

After squeals of protect from a large chunk of their user base, they relented and produced a ‘high contrast’ setting, which was better.

In short, I can’t keep feeling like I’m being punched full in the face by Google every few months. I respect their right to innovate their products in whatever way they see fit, but thankfully I don’t have to choose between liking it or hitting the road.

I’ve switched to Apple’s Mail.app and iCal. They work great, aren’t actively hostile to the visually impaired, and allow me to keep using the Google back end so I can keep my old email addresses and contact info.

Apple may be many things, but one thing they are great about is providing accessibility features for the handicapped. It’s not like I have any illusions about being a minority – most people can probably read the ghostly low contrast color theme just fine, and probably like the fact that their email now looks more like IM.

More power to them I say

Update:  Can’t lie, it’s been a rough go.  Gmail’s IMAP access throttles throughput beyond a certain point, and Apple Mail can’t handle the large mailboxes I have even with having given them a serious slim down.  I really wish there were a solution to this problem.

Update Update: I’ve essentially given up on this Mail.app just plain stinks.  It might be fine for folks with a single account or maybe very light usage on multiple accounts, but with two Gmail accounts and lots of labels, it’s downright abysmal.  It takes 15-20 minutes to get everything in sync, and then often takes another 20 minutes just to exit the app! This is not my idea of an enterprise class  eMail application.  I’m disappointed in you Apple!

When a candidate and the party that backs him set out to legislate what goes on in the bedroom (telling us who to love and marry) and in the doctor's office (making decisions about my reproductive health and that of my wife) it's an affront to me and every like minded American.

Mitt Romney has vowed to do everything in his power to repeal Roe V. Wade. I do not understand even from a common sense perspective as a reasonable adult how this makes any sense. How will returning to an era where women lived in fear and abortions were grisly deeds performed in back alleys with coat hangers benefit the American people?

I have Catholic acquaintances who speak of advocating for the baby, yet they leave out the bit where all these children are carried to term and brought into a life lived in squalid conditions and being cared for by people who are neither capable nor willing to do so.

Then there is the issue of marriage. I find the mere idea that an aspirant to rule would attempt to dictate the gender of the person I choose to take as my life partner repugnant and offensive to the core.

Some of my best friends in this world are gay. In fact, one of them actually performed the marriage ceremony for my wife and I. Just thinking about the fact that Mr. Romney would try to sever the holy bonds of matrimony that he shares with his husband makes me angry.

In my ideal world, government would not be in the business of marriage at all, but that isn't the world we live in today. I applaud the Obama campaign for having had the courage to stand up and say “This isn't right. Let's fix it.”. The naysayers will be quick to point out that this change in attitude was politically motivated, and maybe it was, but really? Who cares? That makes it no less right.

I have been hearing a lot of unhappy people of late expressing dissatisfaction with president Obama and his administration, particularly around jobs and the economy. To my mind, he inherited some of the worst economic conditions of any incoming president in the history of our nation, and while many would dispute this point I feel very strongly that the president has done and will continue to do a bang up job making the best of this awful mess the last 8 years of Republican rule have left us in.

Economy aside for a moment, I am proud to be doing my part to give the president the time he needs to get the job done. This isn't about politics for me, it's about fighting the good fight because it's the right thing to do.

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One of the complaints I hear again and again is that Apple's mobile operating system that runs every iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch are designed based on the “walled garden” philosophy – meaning that you can only install approved apps on the device from Apple's App Store unless you throw all caution (and your warranty ) and jailbreak your device.

Compare this to Google's Android OS where the user can install anything they want, from wherever they want from wherever they want, including some fairly insidious malware. I know I've been spammed two or three times by friends who had their Android phone's address book compromised. However even Google is making moves in more restrictive directions of late, but only in their app store, which you can ignore completely if you prefer.

What these geeks are missing is that for 99% of the population, the jail is a good thing! People want their devices to be appliances. They want to browse the web without fear, write their documents and spreadsheets unfettered by things like virus checking, file systems and storage devices, and play their games secure in the knowledge that they're not pulling in a Trojan that will send Nazi supremacist hate mail to their grandma and their boss.

The hard truth for many geeks to accept is that for end users, this represents pretty much the ideal computing experience. This goes way beyond Apple and iDevices and into the realm of general purpose computers like laptops mad desktops.

All one need do is examine the marketing blurbs for the latest OS versions from Apple and Microsoft to validate my claim. Windows 8 features required code signing for installed apps, effectively the beginnings of a walled garden of their own.

As I mentioned previously, Apple lead the charge into the walled garden future I'm predicting with IOS, but with tithe release of MacOS X Mountain Lion, they're filing the rough edges from the computing experience for desktop and laptop users as well.

Honestly it's been rather amusing to,watch the geek-o-sphere practically tremble with rage over this issue, ranting and roaring on about Apple's new found tyranny.

In truth I just don't get it. Gatekeeper can be bypassed with a single key press. What's the big deal? I predict that there will always continue to be trap doors and escape hatches for those who know enough to seek them out.

Apple is in fact not trying to impose some kind of Orwellian new world order and declaring a Jihad on geeks, they're just doing what they've always done, innovating the tech in ways that will improve the quality of life for the majority of users.

Simply put, geeks need to get over themselves. Computing has become such a part of the mainstream of every day life that people don't want or need to be beholden to the techno-priesthood any longer. To my mind, this is nothing but win. Over the long haul, it means we can get out of the business of being family tech support, and get back to playing with technology and having fun pushing the envelope!

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In an ongoing effort to immerse myself in Vim as much as possible, I’m trying out a plugin called VimRepress – a fork of the popular Vimpress plugin.

Installing

Unfortunately, getting it running with MacVim on MacOS X Lion is a bit of a bear, but thankfully Paulo Poiati wrote an excellent article on getting the job done.

Basically, if you’re using Homebrew, you have to rebuild your MacVim to use the i386 architecture, otherwise you wind up with a Python interpreter that doesn’t match the bitness of your editor, and when MacVim goes to invoke Python to run the blogging bits in the plugin, MacVim explodes.

Also unfortunately, you can’t use the Homebrew built Python or Ruby interpreters when building MacVim either, and have to instead use the bundled ones from MacOS (both sorely out of date. Who uses Ruby 1.8 anymore? .

So I had to uninstall my Homebrew based Python and Ruby, install python-markdown2 into the OSX default Python instance, and now everything seems to be working just fine.

Living the Vim Life

VimRepress and Blogging

That said, there are still some creature comforts that I miss from the awesome Blogging bundle in TextMate – silly things like giving me a drop down list with the possible Categories for my post and the like. Hopefully over time we can get those implemented in Vim land

On the upside, and this counts for a lot, is that I can now write in Markdown again <contented sigh> I’ve missed Markdown terribly ever since I transitioned the blog from Typo to WordPress many moons ago. It’s a joy to write in, and really lets me think about the writing, not about a properly formed HTML element, which is priceless.

Vim and Me In the Large

For what it’s worth, thus far the minor pain of transitioning to Vim has been entirely worth it, I’ve definitely seen a noticeable productivity boost, and for work-a-day code and configuration editing, I’m actually finding Vim to be vastly more powerful than TextMate simply because my environment is everywhere I want to be rather than being chained to using my Mac desktop for editing and resorting to chicanery like remote mounted filesystems via sshfs.

For years I’d read The Pragmatic Programmer with its mantra of “Learn one editor, and learn it *well” (paraphrase).

I always had mixed feelings about that. I’d taken pride through most of my career in being able to learn a multitude of different tools and adapt to whatever worked best in the local environment. That is in fact a really great skill to have, but there is definitely wisdom where editors are concerned to pick one and live in it 24/7.

MacVim has helped tremendously with that. With it you can have your cake and eat it to. You can use the very same config files and plugins you use on your UNIX servers on your desktop, only wrapped in a superbly crafted Aqua GUI.

It’s a continuing process, but thus far the work I’ve put in has been totally worth it. I would encourage anyone who’s on the fence to give it a try and be strict with yourself about it. Pick a time when you can afford to take the hit and spend the time to get facile enough that you won’t miss your old environment. You won’t regret it.

I own both an iPad and a Kindle, I use and love both for different things, and in my opinion they’re apples and oranges.  Reading technical books on Kindle is quite frankly an awful experience.  The translations of many of them into Mobipocket format are abysmal.  Sidebars are mangled into poorly formatted blobs of text separated from the main body by a vertical bar if you’re lucky, or maybe a different typeface if you’re not.  Lines are slung together, and pagination is utter hell.

Admittedly, this isn’t entirely Amazon’s fault.  The Mobipocket format is simple to be sure, but if enough care is spent it’s quite possible to produce eminently acceptable results, but as I say, it requires care, which is something most publishers seemingly aren’t willing to provide.

For reading prose, in my humble opinion, nothing beats the experience of an E-ink Kindle.  They’re easy on the eyes, and with many models you get free Whispernet book downloads.  Awesome.  Even when I’m using my iPad, I still do 99% of my ‘fun’ reading with the Amazon Kindle app.

So, while I’ll be the first to admit that business is war and taking out what could be seen as a direct rival is a smart move in one sense, in reality the consumer gets punished, and consumers rarely react well to such treatment.

People will not turn to Amazon because their beloved Stanza has exploded in a fiery ball of doom with the coming of IOS 5, they’ll simply turn to other alternatives like the excellent MegaReader application whose author is working very hard to cater to the Stanza users bereft of their favorite reader.

Dumb move, Amazon.  I am still a loyal fan, and this won’t in any way change how much I buy from you, but I am decidedly not pleased.

I first encountered TextMate shortly after I came to OSX. It’s a great editor,
and I have a tremendous amount of respect for Alan Odegard of Macromates
software. He has just about single handedly created not only an amazing
editor, but a vibrant and loyal community around his program, and he’s to be
commended for that.

I would have remained happy in TextMate land, but for the fact that my most
recent job has me going back to where it all started for me – server side UNIX,
Linux to be exact.

So, I editing files on my Mac using Expandrive to remotely mount them, but
quite frankly that’s a pain in the neck I just don’t need to deal with.

With Vim, I can memorize one set of keystrokes for everywhere I might need to
be.

And with MacVim, I get a nicely streamlined, beautifully Aqua-fied interface,
with all the creature comforts TextMate provides and more.

What’s more, there are a number of folks making the same transition, so there
are some excellent articles and websites out there to ease the transition like
this guide on making the
switch or
the excellent VimCasts series of Vim tutorial screen
casts. They cover everything from the basics to some fairly advanced tips and
tricks on more complex Vim modes and integrations, and is written by a TextMate
to Vim switcher.

Right now I’m writing this post on the excellent
VimRePress plugin for
Vim that allows you to author and manage your WordPress blog right from within
the editor! Very sweet

So, it’s a brave new world, and I’m excited by the opportunity to get
really good at Vim so I can push my editing productivity through the roof

When I was younger, I could pull two or three all nighters in a week with virtually no ill effects. Now, a night with 4 or 5 hours sleep, or a night where my sleep is disturbed by something or other has a real and noticeable effect on me the next day.

I know all the excess weight I’m carrying around isn’t helping, and hence I’ve been exercising religiously, burning about 300 calories per session, which has definitely begun making a dent in my overall weight (I won’t mention numbers yet for fear of jinxing it. I find it’s best not to talk progress until I’ve lost a truly significant amount of and kept it off for a while.)

We bought a treadmill and an exercise bike about 6 months ago now, and those have been invaluable. The ability to exercise at home at my own convenience means I can stumble out of bed, down the stairs, and onto the treadmill so that before I ever have the chance to talk myself out of it, I’m on the treadmill or the bike chugging away.

So, thankfully things are moving in a positive direction. I just have to keep at it, not fall off the horse (again having the equipment in the house eliminates a myriad of excuses!) and be patient.

It’s heartening for me to see a bunch of the younger folks I work with decidedly not falling into the same trap many geeky people from my generation were bitten by. They’re incredibly health conscious, and pretty much all have incredibly rigorous work out regimens and are scrupulous about tracking their weight (One guy has his bathroom scale broadcast his current weight to his Twitter feed. Think I’ll pass on that one, thanks ). I know we’ve all heard the saw about establishing good habits early, but in this case it can’t be emphasized enough.

Anyway, pardon the slightly unfocused ramble, but this stuff has been rattling around my head wanting to be written for a while.

Hope everyone’s enjoying their summer!

They’re largely wrong, at least in all the important ways.

Here are the salient points:

• Discovery – people are *far* more likely to purchase things that are available from a single, readily accessible source. Having a veritable floatilla of awesome software that’s discoverable right from the Apple menu of every Mac means that if you’re a publisher, people are FAR more likely to try your software. I myself found a free copy of Autodesk Sketchpad in the app store that I am very much enjoying. I might end up buying the commercial product as a result – possibly through the app store! (See caveats below for why I might choose the shrink wrapped version.)
• Ease of installation – just like on the iPhone and iPad, you click “Buy” or “Install” and *BOOM* it’s on your machine, happily bouncing in your dock. For non technical people, this is a godsend. They do not want to know about .dmg files, dragging apps to the Applications folder, or the like. Yes, I know, this is VASTLY easier than the folks in the Windows world have it with their highly complex installers, but even still.
• One Stop Shopping for updates – Sure, lots of devs these days are bundling some kind of update mechanism into their apps, but this is once again – seamless and easy to use for non technical people.

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud attached, so there are a few down sides:

• Inflexible upgrade path – Apple has imposed rules around publishers app store offerings, I don’t know all the details, but I do know that publishers are not happy. They want total control of how they monetize the sale of upgrades for their customers, and to a certain extent I can’t blame them. Over all I think the net winner here is the consumer, so we’ll see how many publishers sign up and grudgingly cope with the new rules.
• Restrictive rules about permitted content – Nothing sexy, nothing violent, no Java or Rosetta, just like the IOS app store.

From my perspective, people who object to the app store on OSX are on shaky ground, because unlike the IOS world where the app store is the ONLY way to get apps, the app store on OSX isn’t. You can still install apps the old fashioned way, and Apple has given no indocation that they intend to do this now or at any time in the future. I don’t think it’s in their best interest to do this, and I think people who are predicting imminent doom really need to get their collective head checked.

Then again, geeks do have a propensity for hysterics.

To sum up, I think everyone (publishers, consumers, and the wider Mac community) has everything to gain and nothing to lose from the app store, and I for one welcome the addition.