My snowman is better than yours...

Yep - that's snow.  It started out looking like this:

It's the International Snow Sculpture Championships in Breckenridge CO.  I've always wanted to see it but never had the chance.  Pretty cool! 

My favorite:

Reminds me of the Oysterhead artwork.

But I couldn't be in Breck without a panoramic ;-)

NewsGator Inbox 3.0 is FREE!

“Free” as in you can now get it (though it is still in beta), and “Free” as in you’ll never have to pay for it… ever!

You can also get NetNewsWire, NewsGator Go! and FeedDemon – all of our consumer RSS readers – for free!

Download NewsGator Inbox 3.0 Beta here!

So what’s the catch?  Advertisements? 

Nope!  They’re the same best-of-breed RSS readers they’ve always been… in fact they’re all newer versions with even more useful features then they’ve ever had before!

Ahhh – so you’re slowing development?

Wrong again!  If anything, this enables us to speed up development!

So I get better, more full featured software for free?

Yep!

I still don’t get it.  What does NewsGator get in return?

RSS and other Web 2.0 technologies are exploding in the enterprise market – and we want NewsGator to be the first name you think of.  We’ve made a great name for ourselves (for good reason) and we want even more people to experience why our products are the best.

The other thing we get is something I’ve been talking about with Inbox 3.0 for a while now – attention data.  What people are reading, clipping, email, etc is very valuable and can be used to create some incredible features for all of our users – both business and consumer.

It’s also valuable to you, which is why Inbox 3.0 allows you to export this data via APML.

What about my privacy!

You’re privacy has always been important to us and continues to be.    We want to make our products better by learning from you, but we want to make clear that we will only share aggregate or anonymous data to do this.  For more information, please review our privacy policy (http://www.newsgator.com/privacy.aspx).

If you have more questions, check out Greg Reinacker’s (NewsGator’s CTO) FAQ (http://www.newsgator.com/CompanyInfo/FreeClientFAQ.aspx).  I’ll also be updating this post with more links!

More Links:
http://www.newsgator.com/default.aspx
http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/2008/01/09/newsgators-rss-clients-are-now-free/
http://www.newsgator.com/CompanyInfo/Press/Archive.aspx?post=144
http://jeffnolan.com/wp/2008/01/09/newsgator-client-apps-want-to-be-free/
http://blogs.newsgator.com/support/2008/01/newsgator-clien.html
http://enterpriserss.typepad.com/enterprise_rss/2008/01/newsgator-makes.html
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/free-demon-yes.html
http://ffej.org/index.php/none/all-newsgator-rss-clients-are-now-free/
http://inessential.com/2008/01/09.php

CNN Primary Coverage - Cool touch screen display?

Anyone know what's powering the cool touch screen display CNN is using to zoom in and out of the different districts in New Hampshire?  It acts a lot like an iPhone, but also reminds me of Microsoft Surface.

UAC is a developers friend?

Maybe - I haven't decided yet, but Shawn Oster and Jack Brewster made some comments on my previous post that got me thinking... maybe it's really a good thing.

Jack points out that most organizations have very locked down environments.  Within his own job, he's run into applications that don't work without some sort of elevated privilege (and knowing Jack, probably some good stories about dealing with them) and that his organization will start dumping apps that need special attention to run.

As RSS and RSS Readers become more popular within enterprises, this becomes extremely important.  No IT department is going to sign off on software that requires them to, as Jack puts it, "hack folder or registry permissions" in order to deploy to thousands of users.  They'll simply pass.

Shawn says that "Windows developers got very, very lazy in always assuming every user had full admin rights and now we're paying for it."  I agree - and admit that I have fallen into this trap as well. 

The first private beta of Inbox 3.0 had code that wrote a temporary file into the same directory it was executing from.  That's bad!  Multiple user machines share that directory - but I didn't take that into account.  Only till a beta tester using UAC ran into issues did I notice my mistake (and change the code to write to the proper place within the users %localappdata% where my other user specific files are written).

A long time ago I had written a piece of code that attempted to change a registry key under LOCAL_MACHINE.  Again, bad!  In that case, we got a support email from Larry Osterman, a guy who knows a thing or two about Windows, pointing it out.

In both cases, developing while using UAC as Shawn suggests, would have caught these bad practices before the code ever left my own box - and saved me two support emails and two frustrated users.  So that's what I'm going to do from now on.

UAC is a developer nightmare

UAC or "User Access Controls" may be the worst thing Microsoft ever did to desktop developers.  I develop mostly on Vista but run as Administrator with UAC off cause I just can't take being asked "Are you sure?" every time I click something.

I then have to go back and test everything again with UAC turned on and almost always a handful of things just don't work the same with UAC.  They don't fail (as in throw an exception), they just don't work!

For instance, I had some code that would start an instance of IE and hook some events.  In XP and in Vista without UAC, this works fine.  One IE instance opens and my events work as expected.  Turn on UAC and IE opens two instances.  One that navigates to nothing - which presumably are what my events are hooked - and one that navigates to the page I asked for, but sheds all my events.  This totally, and silently, breaks my code.

Ugh... way to go Microsoft.

Spaces - my new favorite Mac feature

I've known about spaces since I got my Mac, but I never really played around with them.  I had RedHat running on my home machine in college and loved the multiple desktops - especially when working on projects for classes.  It's just a great way to keep things organized.

Tonight, while working on Inbox, my Vista VM bluescreened and crashed (man I love Vista!) which in turn corrupted the VM itself.  So I had to revert to a really old snapshot and reinstall all the things I had put on since then... including a slew of Windows Updates.

Spaces to the rescue!  I kept my Vista VM in full screen on one space as it downloaded and installed the updates, while I cruised through my feeds in NetNewsWire and surfed around (including downloading FireFox 3) in another space.

Think I'll be using spaces a lot more!

Creating a better user experience: When to use "Feed" versus "Subscription" in "Feed Reader" applications

It was pointed out to me today that NewsGator Inbox uses the terms "Feed" and "Subscription" pretty much interchangeably.  Until today I equated both to mean the same thing... but after looking closer, they really have different meanings depending on the context - and those contextual differences can create a confusing user experience.

So I just spent about an hour going through every string in Inbox to make sure the contextual meaning of each was the same.  This meant deciding on what the definition of a "Feed" is versus what a "Subscription" is in terms of a "Feed Reader" application.  Here's what I came up with... do you agree?

---

"Feed" - any type of syndication resource (atom, rss, etc) published via the internet and whose properties are owned by the publisher of the resource.

"Subscription" - An application (or end user) owned entity whose primary attribute is a "Feed", but whose properties are owned by the end user, allowing for user controlled application specific properties that can (if allowed) override "Feed" properties within the application.

---

Basically it means that you can "Subscribe" to a "Feed", but can only change aspects of your "Subscription".

It's all in the semantics, but the point is to differentiate between things that a user has control over versus things they do not within your application.

For example:
In Inbox, you can search for "Feeds" and then "Subscribe" to them.  Once you're "subscribed" you can change the Title of that Subscription to alter the way it's displayed to you, but that does not affect the Title of the Feed.

Great user interfaces make these difference clear by the language they use.... Inbox didn't in the past...

It does now :-)

"...iPhones and digital cameras and cell phone cameras..."

iPhones - a class unto themselves :-)

(Quote is from MSNBC's coverage of Barack Obama's speech in Iowa)

Rita Kaurt

It's nice to see a little joke that some co-workers of mine and I made up over a year ago, still getting linked to :-)

It all started when two of us went over to talk to Ria, one of our senior QA engineers.  She was away from her desk, but there was a box on her chair.  We joked that the box had replaced her and proceeded to draw on a face and hands and gave it a visitors badge with the name Rita...  the joke didn't go over to well when she came back.

A few months later, she took a months vacation and we really needed a tester.  So we built a bigger, better Rita with a fishbowl head, cardboard tube arms and a wig.  The next thing you know, we're pushing Rita around the office and taking pictures of her in different situations (at one point pushing her past a conference room of full visitors and getting locked out in the elevator lobby).

It was fun, but the only way Ria could see them was to get them up on the web.  Flickrs' nice, but these pictures needed to tell a story.  So I took an hour, wrote it up, and "A Day in the Life of Rita Kaurt" was born.

A few months later, after Ria was back from vacation, our boss was out.  Rita was still around, so we promoted her to management.  Unfortunately Rita's head fell off a few weeks later and smashed.  They say it was an accident, but I'm not so sure.

We really do work sometimes in the office, but you've got to have a little fun as well ;-)