NetNewsWire for Mac started syncing with Google Reader in their latest betas, which makes me really excited because it opens up a ton of choices as to what reader I want to use on my desktop and iPhone. And, since NetNewsWire on the iPhone doesn't yet sync with Google Reader, I figured I'd take the chance to try out Byline, by Phantom Fish.

Setting up Byline is as easy as entering your Google account email address and password. While the app has quite a few settings available in the Settings app, I didn't really find that any of them were all that interesting or important for me to tweak.

As soon as you are logged into Google Reader, Byline gives you the choice of looking at New Items, Starred Items, or Notes. Browsing into New Items lists all of the new posts available for you to read from the last sync. The posts are nice because they not only show the title of the item, like NetNewsWire does, but they also show the first couple of lines of the post.

Clicking on an item gives you a full view of the post. It's your typical post view, with title, author and date, and of course the body of the post. While I think the view is clean and terrifically formatted, I would like to see the title be a clickable link to the web view for the post. The post view also provides a toolbar with options to view the post on the web, email the post, view the post in Safari, star the post in Google Reader, share the post in Google Reader, or write a note about the post. The toolbar icons look good, but aren't totally clear as to what their function was. It took me a bit of testing and searching around, especially in the case of the share button, to figure out what each one did.

Another feature within the post view in Byline is the ability to quickly browse through posts using the up and down arrows. Overall, I think it's a great feature, but it does get on my nerves at times that the buttons are in the top right corner. I hold my phone in my left hand since I'm right handed, and reaching across the screen to click those buttons feels a bit awkward.

One of Byline's greatest features is its caching. Byline caches new posts when they've been downloaded, so that you can read them offline. It also caches starred items and the web page where the post originated, so that they can be read later. I'm not usually away from an internet connection, but I can see where this would be really valuable if part of your daily commute is spent offline, or if you're flying somewhere.

Overall, I feel like Byline has a solid lead over NetNewsWire. Byline does a terrific job with browsing to the page where a post originated from. When I browse through a few links in NetNewsWire and click back, I end up back on the post where I came from. Byline goes back to the previous web page, rather than back to the post view, which ends up being really valuable, not to mention what almost anyone would expect to happen. Additionally, when I'm clicking through new posts, NetNewsWire sometimes stops letting me click through new posts prior to me actually reading all of my new posts. Byline has yet to have that issue for me.

I highly recommend spending the $4.99 and picking up Byline from the App Store, especially if you've already made the switch to the NetNewsWire 3.2 Beta for the Mac. It's got a clean interface, tightly integrates with Google Reader, and certainly improves on NetNewsWire in several clear areas.

I do a few development jobs on the side for friends. One such friend got in touch with me about a week ago wanting me to add a form emailer to his static html site (I developed it using Webby). My first thought was to set it up as a Rails app, but that seemed a little overkill for adding a single feature, especially when Webby gives me layouts for static pages and with Rails I'd have to put a solution for that together. Then I thought about using Widget Finger, but I really didn't want to push him to pay for it, especially not when I already had the site hosted on a virtual private server that we have for Hello Theory.

That's when it hit me. I could use Webby to generate an app that was mostly static, but that used Sinatra to handle the form emailer. Starting with my original Webby site, here's how I did it.

First, I added a folder to the project's content folder named public, and moved all of the existing content files into that folder.

 mkdir content/public
 mv content/* content/public 

Next, I added a new Rackup file (config.ru) to the content folder based on these directions.

 require 'rubygems'
 require 'sinatra'
 root_dir = File.dirname(__FILE__)
 set :environment, ENV['RACK_ENV'].to_sym
 set :root, root_dir
 set :app_file, File.join(root_dir, 'simgins.rb')
 disable :run
 run Sinatra::Application 

I set up my Sinatra script to send email using Pony and tested it. There's a great example of using Pony to send email with Sinatra in the Sinatra FAQ.

Finally, I deployed using Webby's deploy feature:

webby deploy

The combination seems to be working like a charm, and keeps things way simpler for static page development than Rails would have. One small issue that I have is that I haven't come up with a good way to touch the tmp/restart.txt file to get Passenger to reload the app each time I deploy, but I've got a few ideas on that.

Personally I would like Microsoft to get more involved with HTML 5. They’ve sent very little feedback over the years, far less than the other browser vendors. Even when asking them about their opinion on features they are implementing I rarely get any feedback. It’s very sad.

Ian Hickson

Tonight I installed the new OS X 10.5.7 update, and it was horrible. First I tried to use the system updater, and it failed to download 4 or 5 times in a row. Then, I manually downloaded the update from their site and installed it. As my computer restarted, it got into a weird state where a blue screen with a spinner would display, and then a lot of noise would show, and then the whole thing would repeat. I let my computer sit about 20 minutes and then powered it off. Then, my computer restarted three times as I tried to power it back on. And, this thread on MacRumors looks like a lot of people had the same experience.
Last year Apple’s rollout of the iPhone 2 software and Mobile Me was horrible. Mobile Me didn’t work for weeks, and the iPhone 2 had to be restarted every week at first. These difficult upgrades are tarnishing the brand that Apple has built of great user experience.
I love Apple, don’t get me wrong. In fact, I’m one of the biggest Apple fans that I know, and I’m sure tomorrow I’ll be defending this update and Apple in general at work. That said, I’d love Apple even more if their updates were a little less painful. I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get things like that working, and I don’t have to jump through hoops if I’m using a Windows machine and I want to update my operating system, it just updates.
So Apple, I’d suggest one of two things. Either stick with the really bizarre upgrade process with multiple restarts and the crazy loop of blue and black screens, but tell me what’s about to happen, or fix the process so it’s a little more painless.
I’ve got to go get some rest so I can defend you in the morning.

For the past couple of years I’ve had a general way that I wrote admin interfaces in a lot of the web apps that I’ve written, and I finally took the time to release that as a project. So, this past Friday I released Control Center 1.0. It’s a base layout and stylesheet for Rails that helps you write admin interfaces amazingly quickly (install the gem, run script/generate control_center, and customize some links). It’s hopefully interesting to some folks, and if not, well, it being a gem makes it tons easier for me to use.

So go check out Control Center on Github.

Well, I've been experimenting with not using a feed reader anymore for
the past month or so, and while it worked pretty well to look at just
a handful of my favorite sites on a daily basis, I miss the sheer
quantity of information that I was used to seeing every day.

With that said, I really wish that there was a feed reader that would
prioritize my news a bit better for me. I would love to see my feeds
organized by online popularity (maybe based onumber of links to the
story) and by my favorite topics. Also, I would love a reader that
would group duplicate posts together and would follow stories back to
their source. That way I could go through and see most of the news
that I probably want to see and less of the stuff that I probably
don't care about.

It's always a little amazing to me in working with Ruby and Rails that sometimes using symbols works great and sometimes it doesn't. It's really something that should be used in moderation, because symbols are a sort of controlled memory leak. Anyway, the other day I was testing some csv generation code in Log for Life, and I ran into an instance where a symbol isn't acceptable and you might think it should be. I had a block something like this:

respond_to do |format|
  format.html { handle_html }
  format.csv { handle_csv }
end

And I was testing it something like this:

get :action, :format => :csv

My test kept failing because the application was using the html block instead of the csv one. Well, a bit of snooping around showed me that it was an issue of using a symbol versus a string, and changing :csv to "csv" fixed the problem:

get :action, :format => "csv"

Overall, I think Rails needs to be more consistent about taking in either symbols or strings, or at least tell us when they're going to accept which. In this case, it makes tons of sense to use a string, because you can't pass a symbol over http anyway, but still, it's annoying to have to search around and feel crazy because your simple test isn't working like you would expect it to.

This set of photos from Election Night is awesome . It would really be awesome if he keeps the photos coming when he gets into the White House.

You can watch instantly on netflix on your Mac or in Firefox (anywhere that you can run Silverlight) by opt-ing into the beta at http://www.netflix.com/silverlightoptin.

I just tried it out, and it seemed to work great.

An interesting thing happened today. My Alma Mater, Clemson, lost to Maryland. We have more skilled players, better recruiting, better facilities - everything you need to win a game. But, we still lost.

It's interesting to me to see how sometimes great groups of people get together and fail. We see it in sports all of the time, but I've been in teams both in my academic and work careers that failed even though we had what we thought was a great team. Why does this happen?

I think there are tons of reasons. Work ethic, personality conflicts, attitudes, and even bad luck can have something to do with it. But, I think the biggest reason can be summed up as inevitability of failure. There just isn't anyone out there that doesn't fail. It's a part of the human condition that we fail, and that we fail frequently. Those who look incredibly great fail less frequently than others, but they still fail pretty frequently.

Good sports teams, and work teams, get the failure out, though, when it doesn't matter so much. They get rid of failure during practice. They get rid of bad ideas early on. They don't hold on to things that don't work, and they're constantly changing to ensure that they've adequately learned from their failures.