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- Notational Velocity Lives
Years ago — even before Getting Things Done was all the rave — a powerful note-taking application named Notational Velocity, was all the rage. And then it lay nearly dormant. For years. But just a couple nights ago I received a fantastic email notifying me of all that’s been going on with Notational Velocity these many, many months.
Notational Velocity captures your notes in a way that’s so simplistic, you really need to try it out to grasp its brilliance. The application window, from top to bottom, consists of a text entry field, a listing of all notes that have been created, and then the selected note’s content. The top field is multipurpose: Type a note’s title into it and if there’s no currently saved note with that title, hitting return creates the new note and moves your cursor to the body area. If the title you’ve typed matches an existing note, hitting tab selects that note and moves you into the body of that note’s content to continue editing. It’s an elegant concept, and in this writer’s opinion, creates a hugely simple and effective user interface.
There’s a great deal of new features in version 2.0. Making it a universal binary (for Intel Macs) is a great first step. The list is long, so here it is directly from the email:
- Option to maintain/synchronize notes as text files for Spotlight and/or text editor access
- More robust and space-efficient database with encrypted, compressed write-ahead logging
- On-demand mounting of disk images and servers while loading the database
- Optional AES encryption with variable-strength key derivation
- Styled text editor supports font-independent formatting, an alternative to “rich text”
- Partial word-by-word or full-phrase searching
- Highlighting of found words
- Multiple-note selections and sorting by different criteria
- Support for input methods and unicode searching
- Basic support for editing structured text and code
- Per-note undo histories
- Importing of additional file types, including the Mac OS X Stickies database
- “Paste clipboard as new note” command grabs the current web context
- URL and email address recognitionThough the list of enhancements is great, almost more noteworthy is the open status of this great application. If you’re a developer who’s interested in getting your hands dirty in Notational Velocity code, or just want to learn a thing or two, check it out over at github. Hopefully this means that subsequent updates won’t be nearly as few and far between.
It doesn’t get easier than taking and retrieving notes with Notational Velocity. I’m thrilled with the update, and highly recommend giving it a try to see it it will fulfill your note-taking needs as well.
Переслать - Get Your Google Reader Fix Natively
Although much has been said about the death of RSS I, for one, still get most of my news via RSS feeds every day. I find Twitter to be filled with too much extraneous junk, and services like Friendfeed and Facebook still don’t offer the feature set I want from my daily news aggregator. My RSS service of choice is Google Reader, which should come as no surprise as it is by far the most popular RSS Reader out there.
Getting your Google Reader fix is as simple as navigating to the website, but what I really want is a desktop solution that offers all of Google Reader’s features while giving me a Mac-like experience and offline access to downloaded articles. A year ago the choices in this space were almost nil, but thankfully we’ve seen several applications jump into the fray recently. Let’s take a look at each of the contenders.
NetNewsWire
Many Mac users will be familiar with NetNewsWire, which has long been one of the best RSS readers for the platform. I was thus thrilled to hear that the next version of NetNewsWire will be bringing Google Reader support.
NetNewsWire's interface should be familiar to many Mac users.
The current beta of NetNewsWire does support synchronization, starring and folders, but features such as sharing and liking items are still not available. Thankfully the developer has indicated that those features will be implemented. Unfortunately, there's no word about future support for notes and tagging.
NetNewsWire offers excellent keyboard support, a built-in web browser as well as integration with Delicious and Instapaper. Lacking is Twitter or Facebook support. You can send articles directly to a blogging client on your computer, which is a nice feature. I also like the three pane interface that is offered as an alternative to the more traditional interface with articles on top and the preview below.
NetNewsWire also offers a 3-column view and a tabbed browser
Once the latest version of NetNewsWire gets out of beta, the combination of excellent user interface with reasonable Google Reader support will likely be compelling for many. It will still be missing some important features however, like notes, tagging or posting directly to Twitter and Facebook. This will likely keep me from using the software.
EventBox
Unlike other solutions on this list, EventBox is not singularly focused on RSS feeds. Instead it seeks to be the center of your online social life, with support for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg and other services in addition to Google Reader support.
The user interface offers access to your folders and feeds, but given the multi-use nature of the software I have to say that it feels a bit like Google Reader has been shoehorned into a generic interface. There are no keyboard shortcuts for sharing and starring, for example, and no support for tagging or liking.
Google Reader shares the spotlight with other services in EventBox.
Given EventBox's support for a wide variety of social networks, you might expect sharing items from Google Reader to those various networks would be easy. Unfortunately this isn't the case. You can send an item to Twitter or Instapaper, but not directly to any of the other social networks that EventBox supports.
EventBox is still undergoing active development and the developer says they are specifically working on improving integration between services. Still, improving the Google Reader implementation doesn't seem to be high on the priority list. Hopefully this changes in the future, but as of now it's not a good choice for most Google Reader users.
Gruml
I have used both NetNewsWire and EventBox extensively in the past, but I have to admit that Gruml is new to me. To be fair, it's new to many of us as the application just opened to a public beta a few weeks ago.
At first glance Gruml is a Google Reader power user's dream. It has by far the most complete implementation of features amongst the three applications I looked at, including support for starring, sharing, liking, notes and tags. There's also support for posting an article directly to Twitter.
Gruml packs in the features, but constant lag is a problem.
The user interface is similar to NetNewsWire's, with the option of a standard mail-like interface or a three-column view. Like NetNewsWire, there is also a built-in web browser for viewing articles and solid keyboard navigation support. Unique to Gruml is a menu bar icon that shows you how many unread items you have and pops up a list of the most recent articles when you click on it.
Gruml also offers the most complete access to Google Reader interface features, for example you can view your starred, shared, liked and noted items. You may also view a list of all your feeds, see them organized by folder or view articles by tag.
Unfortunately not all is well with Gruml, as you might expect from an application that is still in Beta. The biggest problem is laggy performance. While using the application I experienced constant slowdowns. Even moving to a new article would sometimes summon a beach ball, as did attempting to mark all articles in a folder as read.
If the developers of Gruml can address these performance issues, however, it currently offers the greatest hope for a complete Google Reader experience on the Mac desktop.
Conclusion
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Mac desktop clients for Google Reader are a new phenomenon. This can be seen clearly by the fact that all three pieces of software I looked at are still in Beta. As it stands today, I don't find any of them offer the mix of features and performance I'm looking for, so I still use a Fluid SSB with Google Gears for offline support to access Google Reader. All three applications offer hope for the future, however, and I can easily see myself using one of these in a year.
Переслать - iTunes 9: Keeping In Sync
iTunes 9 brings about a much more flexible setup for syncing. It's definitely an improvement, in some senses, but still far from perfect. In fact, many might be quick to term some of the options as "feature creep." Check out some of our thoughts on the new options and look at the side by side screenshots of the syncing options to get an idea.
Syncing in general has been improved in the sense that users can now drill down and sync more specific content. Music can now be synced by a combination of playlists, specific artists or genres. Podcasts can be synced by specific episodes and TV shows can be synced by specific episodes or seasons.
New altogether is the ability to sync iTunes U content which also has its own category, instead of being mixed in randomly between podcasts and music. Photo syncing has also been greatly enhanced, allowing support for specific albums, events or faces. Searching has also been enabled in many of these areas to allow you to quickly narrow down your choices. While these are all great features, they have really intensified the syncing interface. Hopefully it's not too much for some users.
Still No Love for Audiobooks?
As mentioned in my wish list, I was really hoping for an improved way to sync audiobooks. Apple answered my hopes in an odd way. In the Music section, you can now search through your artists and, upon searching for a particular author, I was able to sync up those specific audiobooks. This isn't a perfect solution though as a user may have multiple audiobooks from the same author. Why not just add another tab across the top? Apple added one for iTunes U. (I'm completely kidding. Remember, the interface is getting too complicated. iTunes 8 had eight tabs for syncing options while iTunes 9 brings the number to 10.) I personally feel the number of tabs across the top is too many, but I do feel audiobooks are important enough to warrant a more selective approach for syncing instead of just creating playlists for them.
Home Screens, Sweet Home Screens
Of course, the part most of you will really care about is the ability to organize your iPhone and iPod touch home screens via iTunes. This is simply amazing and is surprisingly quite functional. You simply navigate amongst the home screens, deleting or adding as needed and dragging applications between them. If you want to drag an item from the first screen to the fifth, just click and drag the app and hover over the fifth screen. It'll pop up in the main view and you can place your app.
You can also select multiple apps by holding down the Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) keys. Moving complete screens around is also a snap, just by clicking and dragging them. All in all, this feature works quite well and should give users no excuse for messy randomly placed apps on their iPhones (or at least quell frustrations of people who attempt to switch between pages while editing apps only to grab and app and move it instead).
Generally speaking, these new syncing options do give users more flexible options to manage content on their devices, but I'm curious to see if any of you feel the interface itself has become a little overblown?
Переслать - Snow Leopard Sales Seen Doubling Leopard
Just two weeks after being released, Snow Leopard is already setting records. According to NPD, sales are more than twice that of plain-old Leopard in its first two weeks, and nearly four times that of Tiger.
“Even though some considered Snow Leopard to be less feature-focused than the releases of Leopard or Tiger, the ease of upgrading to Snow Leopard and the affordable pricing made it a win-win for Apple computer owners — thus helping to push sales to record numbers" said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD.
While it’s true Apple is not counting off 300 “new features,” as was done with Leopard, and it’s mostly true that Snow Leopard is an easy upgrade, at least after 10.6.1, the story here is really about price. At $29, Snow Leopard costs less than a quarter of the $129 price of Leopard or Tiger.
NPD further reports that the sales momentum has declined from the first week to the second by only around 25 percent, contrasting sharply with a decline of 60 percent for both Leopard and Tiger. NPD’s Stephen Baker suggests that Apple’s “aggressive pricing policies in this economic environment generate an outstanding consumer response," but there is also money in volume. Macrumors previously reported on a research note from Piper Jaffray research analyst Gene Munster predicting as many as 5 million copies sold during the current quarter. That’s good news for the bottom line, but there may be another benefit for Apple in the low price of Snow Leopard.
While there are few new features in the user interface, Snow Leopard does make use of new technologies, like Grand Central. By encouraging users to upgrade through a lower price, the adoption of those technologies will occur sooner rather than later. An upgrade wave also makes it easier to discontinue supporting legacy technology associated with the PPC architecture, like Rosetta, now an optional install with Snow Leopard. Ultimately, this means the low price of Snow Leopard now will reap support savings for Apple in the future.
At $29, Snow Leopard appears to be a good deal for both consumers and the company. If there is a downside, it could come in trying to charge $129 for the next iteration of OS X. Good luck with that, Apple.
Read our latest analysis piece, "Can the News Industry Move Beyond Its Napster Phase?" Only on GigaOM Pro.
Переслать - PSP Minis Will Be Like iPhone Apps, Only Neutered
When I first heard that some of the first PSP Minis out the gate would be ported iPhone apps, I admittedly got a little bit excited imagining the competitive power of iPhone games on a platform with actual physical hardware controls. Turns out I should’ve reserved judgment.
First, as you may have seen, Minis will be limited to games only, so that’s a whole vast uncontested field left open for the iPod touch. That was bad enough, but now it looks like Minis will only be pale shadow versions of their former selves by the time they hit the PSP. For Minis, both wireless multiplayer and DLC or feature updating will be completely forbidden.
That’s right, according to Gamasutra, Sony’s putting its foot down on anything more complicated than pass and play in terms of multiplayer, and games will be pretty much static upon release. Both restrictions are said to be in service of expediting the review and approval process, a lesson they clearly learned from the beast that is Apple’s App Store submission review system. But is it the right takeaway?
If anything, Apple’s success with the App Store should actually suggest the opposite — namely, that allowing feature-rich and dynamic content into your marketplace is well worth the time investment and criticism you bring upon yourself in the process. Pocket God couldn’t exist in the climate Sony is setting up for Minis, nor could F.A.S.T. (Fleet Air Superiority Training).
Oh, and remember, there’s a 100MB cap for any game released in Mini form. Which cuts out another huge chunk of wildly successful iPhone and iPod touch games. Great job, Sony. I’m sure you’ll have iPhone devs climbing over themselves to generate releases for your untested, extremely limited platform.
Переслать - Autodesk Brings Sketchbook Product Line to the iPhone
Is the iPhone quietly becoming a serious mobile illustration platform? That’s the question I asked myself after seeing news this morning that yet another drawing and painting program has been released for the device. Autodesk’s Sketchbook Mobile is available now in the App Store.
Those of you who’ve done professional illustration work on a Mac will probably recognize the heritage of this latest addition to the field. Autodesk is the company that acquired Alias, the makers of Sketchbook Pro. Sketchbook Pro has long been one of the very best digital painting programs available for the Mac platform.
I’ve tried both Layers and Brushes, and while I’m generally pretty useless with both, I do see my ability slowly growing, and more capable artists than myself have been able to generate pretty stunning images using only the limited toolset these apps and your finger provide. Recently introduced features, like the ability to export to .PSD in Layers, have elevated the game from idle play to a serious outlet for digital art on the go.
Sketchbook Mobile doesn’t export to .PSD (it uses the .PNG static image format), unfortunately, but it does bring a UI tailored for a touchscreen interface that’s been developed and refined for many years in the desktop version of the app. The result is an uncluttered working space that still allows quick access to all of your tools in a unique, radial menu design.
Like Layers, and more recently, Brushes, Sketchbook Mobile offers standard painting tools like layers, different types of brushes, color and media pickers, and so on. That said, Sketchbook Mobile still manages to feel like the most underpowered of the bunch despite its pedigree. The full version (iTunes link) is $2.99, but you can get a free Express version (iTunes link) to try it out first.
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