Symphonious

While the buzz surrounding the release of OS X 10.4 continues to build I’ve found it amusing how Microsoft have been desperately pushing Longhorn in the last couple of weeks only to receive criticism about it and then desperately try to point out that all the cool stuff just isn’t there yet, but it will come soon - honest!

I’d say more but I think Crazy Apple Rumours summed it up perfectly.

So apparently Safari now passes the Acid 2 test (or at least the CVS version does).  Excellent work.  What’s more impressive though is that the patches needed are all available so the KHTML developers should be able to integrate the fixes themselves reasonably quickly.  I have however heard reports that the KHTML team refused to accept a large amount of Apple’s patches for various reasons so the code bases may be far enough diverged now that merging is problematic - anyone know for sure?

I wonder how the Mozilla team are progressing?  Hey Scoble (or other suitably connected and/or informed people), are the IE 7 team working on Acid 2 support?  How far along are they?  Anyone with Opera connections know how they’re going with Acid 2 (weren’t they a driving force behind writing it?)?

Hopefully it won’t be too long before web developers can create ridiculously convoluted code to paint happy faces and have it work in all browsers!

So now there’s adsense for RSS feeds (or at least an early beta of such).  It raises some interesting issues.  I hate ads so I’ll quite happily unsubscribe from any feed that has ads in it, but what about the various planets that I subscribe to?  What if one person who’s syndicated through those planets adds advertising to their RSS feeds, would I unsubscribe from the whole planet?  Possibly.  What if a few people did?  Probably.

What is a fair policy for planet administrators to take on this?  Is it okay for them to remove the ads from the feeds so as not to annoy their readers?  Should they drop feeds that contain ads?  Should they offer two feeds, one that includes the people with ads and one that doesn’t?

Personally I’d consider it poor form to put ads in your RSS feed, if you want to build a business model around displaying ads, put a summary in the RSS feed and make people go to your site and view the ads there if they actually want to read it.  Just because your RSS feed comes into my news reader doesn’t mean I’m actually interested in anything you write - there are certain people who come through planet aggregators that I wish I could have taken out of the feed but the convenience of having all the other blogs in one feed and someone else finding and adding other feeds makes it worth putting up with skipping the extraneous entries.

Someone needs to come up with a better business model than trying to pay for everything by cramming ads down the users throats or everyone will wind up resorting to ad-blocking software.  How long before ad-blocking comes as a standard part of browsers?  They already support blocking pop-up ads.

Update: Well the first unsubscription due to ads has happened.  Slashdot decided it was a good idea to put ads in their RSS feed despite the fact that the feed doesn’t include links to the articles anyway so I go to their website for anything worth reading anyway.  So just like that I’ve kicked my slashdot habbit - it’s probably for the best anyway.  Well, I must admit, I still subscribe to the feed for the Apple section because it hasn’t delivered any ads yet but I imagine it’s just a matter of time before they cram them in their as well.

While I’m updating, Ugo Cei had a few things to say about ads in RSS which is worth reading.  There definitely needs to be some effort put in soon to provide some options for this.  Planet style aggregators probably need to have an option to filter out ads, blogging tools need an option to create separate feeds with and without ads (most likely the without ads only contains a summary while the with ads feed contains the full text).  Personally I’m considering finding a way to just block the ads so they don’t display in my feed reader (I’d be happy to download them, just not display them) - I’m philosophically opposed to clicking on them anyway.

I have to give another congratulations to the NetNewsWire team - I just realized I’d been taking advantage of a very simple but very clever piece of user interface design.  The contextual menu in the NetNewsWire browser has two “Reload” menu items in it, one at the top and one at the bottom.

Regardless of where you click on the page and whether or not the contextual menu pops up or pops down from your mouse cursor, the reload item is always right next to your cursor so it’s easy to hit.  Now you might think that it would be better to just detect which way the contextual menu popped and move the refresh menu item to that end, or even flip the entire menu so that the distance to all the items is unaffected by how the menu pops.  The downside of doing that though is that it makes it much harder to find the items because they keep moving around.  With the duplicated item, the menu is always the same so it’s very quick to identify which way it popped and then move to the item while still keeping the most commonly used item close at hand.

Someone obviously put a lot of thought into that feature.  I’m impressed.

The engineers at work are starting to find reasons to have an news feed aggregator running on their machines at work, mostly so they can keep track of changes being made to the wiki, but it provides a convenient mechanism to push content out to the entire team without being too intrusive.  For some reason RSS feeds seem to be able to handle more information flowing past before it all becomes to much to sort through.  As we get more of the engineers with RSS aggregators running, there’s a much lower barrier to entry for new information feeds and a much higher pay-off for developing them.  For instance, when I get a few free moments I’d like to set up an RSS feed for CVS commits (this is harder than it seems since somehow we wound up using CVSNT instead of just putting the CVS repository on one of our Solaris boxes).  If I’m the only one subscribing to that feed it’s probably not worth setting up, but if half the engineering team is subscribed then it can really start to increase the chances of stupid mistakes or missed scenarios being picked up.

An RSS feed for bugzilla would be useful as well as would a feed from our custom built feature manager.  The latest build results would be much better delivered via RSS instead of email too, might have to go searching for a CruiseControl reporter that can do that.

Once you have all those RSS feeds, you should be able to build a project dashboard much easier as well as providing the ability for engineers to customize it just by syndicating the RSS feeds - a pretty straight-forward XSLT should be able to do it in fact.  The biggest problem is that there’s so many different formats for feeds to use but since it’s all internal you could probably standardize on one or two pretty easily.

Shame we out-sourced our support tracking system to an external host or we could have built an RSS feed into that as well and made it easier to pick up on new support issues that get assigned to me.

I’m not sure what happened but somewhere along the way, email lost it’s ability to effectively manage information and RSS seems to be rapidly filling that void.  There’s still a lot of use for email but it’s no longer my preferred notification mechanism anymore.  I think I’ll have to adapt Scoble’s rule of firing any marketing team that puts up a website without RSS - anyone who releases a product that needs to provide notifications or regular updates and doesn’t provide an RSS feed should be fired.