Toluu

Nick Bradbury

Personal ramblings from the creator of HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon.

The Great Un-Friending of 2009January 3

If we ever friended each other on Facebook, then there’s a good chance you’re annoyed with me right now for un-friending you.  But I swear it’s nothing personal.  Lemme ‘splain.

I’ve been on Facebook for a while but I never really used it – the UI felt clumsy and cluttered, and I just didn’t get the appeal.  But lately I keep running into people in the “real world” who swear by Facebook, so I decided I should take a second look at it.

BTW, when I say “real world,” I mean the world away from my computer and the small circle of geeks I cocoon myself in.  If you’re not familiar with that world, it’s worth a visit.  Nobody cares what OS you’re running, what browser you’re using, or whether your HTML validates.  And best I can tell, there are more women there, too.

Anyway…because I never used Facebook, I just blindly friended anyone and everyone.  Which now, of course, makes it such a noisy place that I can’t possibly spend any time there.  So I pared down my list of friends to a much smaller group of semi-related folks in the hopes that I’d better understand why so many people like Facebook.  And the first people to get cut were my geeky friends.

So, don’t take it personally if I un-friended you – it probably just means you’re a geek, in which case you should be

Building a Better Twitter Feed ReaderJanuary 1

Like many of you, I’m addicted to reading Twitter.  And not surprisingly, I’m also addicted to reading feeds.  So you’d think I’d love reading my Twitter feeds in FeedDemon, right?

Unfortunately, no.  The problem is that Twitter feeds are plain text – no hyperlinks, no images, no nothing.  As a result, reading Twitter feeds is a bland experience in any feed reader.  For example, here’s how an item in a Twitter feed looks in the current FeedDemon:

That’s a boring way to view a Twitter stream, so I’ve spruced things up in the next build of FeedDemon 2.8.  Here’s how the same item will look:

As you can see, there are a number of improvements.  First, URLs are automatically hyperlinked and benefit from the short URL preview feature I mentioned last week.  Author names and @replies are automatically hyperlinked as well so you can click to view that person’s Twitter stream.  I’ve also added hyperlinking of #hashtags – just click to go to a Tw

Start the New Year With a New TopStyleDecember 31 2008

Earlier this month I announced that Stefan van As has acquired TopStyle, and I pleased to now announce that Stefan has just released the first beta of TopStyle 4.0.

There are some great additions in this new version, such as:

• Unicode support (at long last!)
• Live FTP editing
• Customizable HTML toolbar
• Code folding
• Bookmarks

My favorite new feature has to be Unicode support.  I use TopStyle to edit all of FeedDemon’s CSS, HTML, XML and XSL files, and it’s great to finally be able to save them as UTF-8/UTF-16 in TopStyle.

If you’d like to try it out, stop by Stefan’s TopStyle 4 site to download it.  This is a beta, of course, so it comes with the usual warnings about not downloading it unless you’re comfortable using unfinished software.  That said, as long as you install TopStyle 4 in a different folder than TopStyle 3, you can still run both versions at the same time – so you can try out TopStyle 4 without fear of messing with the current version.

PS: Just a reminder that since TopStyle 4 is no longer “mine,” questions and comments about TopStyle 4 should be posted to Stefan’s

It Sucks to Throw Away New CodeDecember 29 2008

Earlier this year I wrote about the joy of throwing away your code.  It’s true - as a rule, programmers generally love getting rid of old code.  But I discovered a corollary to that rule: it sucks to throw away code that you just wrote.

I know because I had to throw away a ton of code I wrote last week.

You know that upcoming FeedDemon feature I wrote about in my last post, the one which shows where a shortened URL will take you?  Well, in my first design, it didn’t display a balloon tip with the long URL.  Instead, when you clicked a short URL, it took you to a separate preview page that looked like this (click to enlarge):

I spent a few days coding this, but when I sat back and looked at it, I wasn’t wild about how you had to click a short URL to know where it would take you – it seemed like an unnecessary step.  I de

Coming in FeedDemon: Know Where That TinyURL Will Take YouDecember 26 2008

URL shorteners such as TinyURL perform a handy service: give them a long URL, and they return a shorter URL that’s less likely to break in emails.  Twitter users in particular benefit from URL shorteners because they enable shrinking a URL that would otherwise exceed Twitter’s 140-character limit.

There is, however, a downside.  When you’re faced with a short URL, you have no idea where it really goes.  Does it redirect to a useful site, or does it go to a phishing page?  For all you know, the link could point to a porn site that pops up the kind of images that your boss wouldn’t think too highly of.

In my case, I use FeedDemon as my primary web browser, and I was tired of looking at my Twitter page and not knowing where all those TinyURLs would take me.  So I decided to address this problem.

Starting with the next build of FeedDemon 2.8, mousing over a short URL will show a balloon tip which contains the long URL – so you’ll know where the link takes you before you click it.  Here’s how it looks:

So far, I’ve added support for the following URL