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Sunday, June 2, 2002

I've spent all weekend circling around the idea for some kind of "web companion" application. What it boils down to is that I really like Radio's backend, and I'm really frustrated with it's front end. It's too much of a PITA to write entries in a text box, HTML code and all.

Problems I'd like to solve:

I'd like it to be easier to impulse blog a page. "Easier" includes:
- WYSIWYG editing on OS X. (Doesn't have to be the whole nine yards, but easy italics, bolds, anchors, and bulleted lists.)
- Easy attributing of the source of the link. (The news aggregator in Radio has spoiled me, but it only works if you've got the story in the aggregator.)
I'd like it to be easier to keep track pages I've once seen, without having to dump them all in a bookmark list. Again, I'd like at least some info about how I got there, as well as my reactions to it at the time. All this crap needs to be easy to search/get at so I can decide to blog something later on reflection.
I'd like it to be easy to spit these little information hairballs to my blog and/or to my e-mail lists.
I'd like a more useful version of the news aggregator. This includes:
- A real UI. It drives me crazy to have to scroll through all of the stories in 100-stories-per-page chunks. If you ever accumulate more than 100 stories, it's game over, because it's too difficult to scan everything once and then go back to the interesting nuggets at the end.
- At least a half-assed attempt to work on sites that lack RSS feeds (say, grab the page and diff. Do something reasonable about the changing content that's just noise, like ads or little info boxes). (So I can track my friends' pages that are updated infrequently... just like mine! :) ).

You can consider this an "open source" idea, since I doubt I'll get around to it. If I do, I expect it'll be an OS X app, though :).

Some apps I found while punching on this concept:

Pineapple. This is a early draft of an OS X RSS reader. I hold out hope since it's an early version, but I found it difficult to use. I'm sure the interface will evolve over time, though.
Bookmark Tool. The main feature of interest is that it can watch for changed sites in your bookmarks, but it failed to properly deal with Blogspot's goofy backend, and kept marking one site hosted there as always having new content.

9:45:05 PM (comments [])

Note to Mac developers: stop using Cmd-H for other things, even if you've used it for a decade or more under Classic. I don't care what it was being used for; being able to hide the app quickly is more useful. (Offender #1: Radio, which uses Cmd-H for "find & replace next". I usually just want to start Radio and then hide it, since the built-in UI isn't really helpful for weblog editing. So why do you make "start & ignore" hard for the 95% of your users who'll never use the outliner or script editing capabilities? I mean, I'm glad they're there and all, but geez.)

Note to Mac users: if pressed, there's always ResEdit for eliminating pesky command key shortcuts. Too bad you'll have to reapply that fix every time you get a new version. 6:00:27 PM (comments [])