Firefox Themes causing out of position pixels

That Web Guy had a problem with a design not being pixel perfect – only it turned out to be down to the theme he was using in Firefox. Bug?

Google Reader adds filters to ‘Mark as Read’

Users of Google Reader can now declare partial feedreader bankruptcy – feeds older than a day, a week or two weeks can now be marked as read, rather than wiping everything.

Filtering which items to flush in Google Reader

Orbicule and MobileMe to overlap functionality

In a post on forthcoming OS support for Orbicule, support for sending a message to an iphone and remotely playing a noise is mentioned. With the recent release of iPhone OS 3.0, these are the major selling factors Apple is using to entice users to MobileMe.

With all the reports over the approval process for apps being submitted to App Store, can Orbicule guarantee that their app will get through with these features? Apple previously refused to approve Podcaster on the grounds that it duplicated the functionality of the podcast section of iTunes.

Feed readers for OSX

It’s been a week since I bought my first Mac, and i’m starting to install software that I knew I could only manage a week without – the first of which is a feedreader.

I use Newsgator online and therefore have a paid FeedDemon install on my Dell laptop, as these synchronise. This means I can read stuff in FeedDemon when i’m at my desk and Newsgator when i’m not without having to read the same items twice over.

This presents an obvious choice for a Mac feedreader – NetNewsWire (Lite). This also synchronises with Newsgator and so will save me a lot of time and effort during the daily catch-up.

I feel though that as Newsgator brought in each component, they have done the bare minimum to integrate it into the brand. Neither of the application-based readers under the Newsgator umbrella do any more than synch with Newsgator. Surely it would make more sense to have them support the same features and synchronise settings (ie flagged items, watch lists) with Newsgator instead of simply synchronising subscriptions. One step further would be to bring the same look and feel to both feedreaders – if iTunes can look the same on both Windows and Mac, then FeedDemon and NetNewsWire can.

RSS is a technology that is begging to be jumped on by the uneducated masses – as shown by the inclusion of feed readers in IE7 – but Newsgator don’t seem to have spotted this potential yet.

Windows-based Macs without OSX

I was reading an article by Sam Gerstenzang entitled ‘Why Boot Camp is the Beginning of the End for Windows‘ (ok, so i’m four months behind on my feed-reading) and mostly I agree with his conclusion, that although Boot Camp enables more of the market to run Windows, it will eventually cause the downfall of Windows itsself.

One thing that occurred to me is that even when (if?) Boot Camp is to be included in the upcoming OSX Leopard, users still need to run the program within OSX to install Windows on a Mac.

If I were Steve Jobs, I’d plan to integrate Boot Camp into the wizard that OSX launches (to configure the machine) when a new Mac is first used by the end user. If the options available were…

1. Customise OSX
2. Customise OSX and install Windows
3. Just install Windows, and set it as the startup

…Apple would be able to catch the market of users who will never want to leave Windows but do want a reliable and stylish machine. This wouldn’t necessarily speed up the downfall of Windows, but would bring Apple some of the market share currently owned by Dell, Lenovo and other large scale hardware manufacturers.

Where IE7 could beat Firefox

I installed IE7 Beta 2 today, to see how a new site design worked, and I am quite impressed. The development team seem to have actually thought about how people interact with an application and have made some of the features quite intuitive.
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