Symphonious

Great to see Ugo Cei joining the side of good, er, those with full text feeds.  Shame to hear about the cause of it but I’ll definitely be reading a lot more of Ugo’s writings in the future - the barrier to entry is now much lower.  There’s no need for me to decide if I’m interested in the post based on a short summary, I start reading and don’t stop until I get to the end or get bored.  Essentially the impetus is now on my to decide I don’t want to read the entry instead of on deciding that I do.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how to reduce the barrier to entry for communication and one of the biggest factors is to push content at users instead of making them go out and get it.  Full text feeds push the content to the user, partial text feeds push part of the content to the user and not having an RSS feed at all makes the user take all the initiative.

The other key factor is speed - users want to get the information fast.  Whatever interface they use has to be snappy - rich client aggregators will be more likely to be successful than web based ones because of the responsiveness.  AJAX can help but there’s nothing quite like having the data on the local hard drive for speeding up access times.  Of course there are other benefits to web based aggregators, particularly the ability to access them from anywhere and more easily share subscriptions etc.  If you’re finding it hard to get through all the items in your aggregator though, consider how much time is wasted waiting for each entry to display and to generally interact with the program - it makes a surprisingly large difference to the feel of the process.  If things are slow to respond it tends to feel a lot more like hard work and you get tired of it more quickly.  Of course, you may just want to dump a bunch of RSS feeds….

Somehow I got the song Your Feets Too Big stuck in my head and since I don’t have a copy, I went searching the iTunes music store.  I found the original Fats Waller version but decided I liked the version from the new cast of Ain’t Misbehaving, The Fats Waller Musical more and added it to my cart.  Then of course iTunes recommended I buy the entire album (all Fats Waller hits) and after a sampling the various songs I succumbed and bought the lot.  It’s very good.

One other nice touch, when I added the entire album to my shopping cart I still had the individual song there too - iTunes was smart enough to realize I was buying that song as part of the album and removed it from my cart.  It’s that kind of attention to detail that makes UIs really nice to use.

I just downloaded Eclipse 3.1 M7 and tried it out.  This is the first eclipse build I’ve tried on OS X 10.4 (on Java 1.4.2_07 and Java 1.5.0_02) and for the first time it actually appears usable on my powerbook.  Previous builds (on previous OS’s with previous versions of Java) were always frustratingly slow to use and I’d rapidly give up and go back to a Linux or Windows box (or vi).  With this release it appears to keep up with my typing, editor windows open and close quickly and startup is really fast.

A lot of the improvements is due to the Eclipse team improving SWT performance and Eclipse performance in general but there’s probably a substantial benefit provided by the new OS as well - Swing-based and non-GUI Java apps appear to be noticeably faster on OS X 10.4 as well.

Top job to all involved!