tomputer

I’ve been through a few different RSS readers over the past couple of years but recently had settled on FeedReader. It’s free, does all the basics very well and didn’t have any glaringly obvious features missing. Today when I launched FeedReader it prompted me to download a new version which I dutifully did but while at the website downloading the new release I read a user’s comment saying that it wasn’t as good as GreatNews so I headed over to the developer’s site (CurioStudio) to check it out and was tempted by a couple of items on the featurelist:

It’s fast even with hundreds of feeds – I must admit that FeedReader takes a while to startup and shutdown and ocasionaly to move between feeds, not an age but long enough to notice.

It has stats, and I’m a sucker for stats! I can see my most/least read feeds and the most/least active (by number of posts).

It has a “newspaper style” reading view. This is the biggest draw for me because it’s much easier to find interesting articles by glancing at a page that is made up of several stories along with their title, content and images rather than by scanning down a list of story titles like the tradition email inbox view. Take engadget for example: I’ve noticed that I read a lot less of their content in FeedReader because the story titles don’t grab my attention, but in GreatNews I can glance at the page and see images of shiny new gadgets begging me to read more. Take a look a the two screenshots below from FeedReader and GreatNews to see what I mean (it’s also possible to create custom view styles using css).

The other great thing about RSS readers (from a user’s point-of-view anyway) is that there’s a very low barrier to switching allegiance. I exported all my feeds as OPML from FeedReader and imported them into GreatNews in no time at all and all that I lost was the record of which feeds I had read and which had new unread content – I can easily live with that.

I got a Nabaztag last week. It’s an wifi enabled ambient device for the home that can provide information in the form of audio, speech, or coloured lights for news updates and alerts that it downloads from the internet. I think the concept is great: a device that keeps me up-to-date with weather, traffic, email or twitter without me having to boot up my computer. The technology is quite sophisticated: the initial setup is done by holding a button for 5seconds to turn the device into a wireless access point, then connect to the access point from a computer and browse to its config pages (it doesn’t have an ethernet port). From here you configure the network settings for your wireless network and then restart it and it connects to your network and the lights glow green to indicate that it has got an internet connection. All configuration is then done from the my.nabaztag.com website.

After playing around with my Nabaztag over the weekend my initial impressions are that it has a few flaws:
- The form factor. It’s supposed to look like a rabbit, which makes it look like a kids toy and not something you want to sit on the coffee table in your living room.
-The interface. The main way that the device communicates its updates is through either text-to-speech or mp3 clips. It has some lights on the front that can be configured to glow different colours to indicate different statuses, but this is quite limited. This means that every update interrupts whatever you happen to be doing at the time. I want it to be a device that sits in the corner of the room so that I can glance at it to get very high level updates and then pick it up and interact with it to get more detail. Ambient. I don’t want it to interrupt the meal I’m eating or the film I’m watching or the conversation I’m having.

Well, so far, so bad but I haven’t got to the best part: it has an API so it’s hackable! It has a very simple REST-like API that lets you send it to sleep, wake it up, change the light colour, send it some text for it read aloud or move the position of the ears (yes, really!). This certainly makes it a more useful device for me and I applaud the manufacturers, Violet, for making the device so open. I’ve started to play around with a Netvibves UWA widget for it which I’ll post here when it does something useful (there are already several 3rd party widgets available).

I’m still undecided whether this will be a useful device for me or whether it will be heading for eBay. I’m still really keen on the Chumby (or will be, when they start shipping to the UK) which I don’t expect to suffer from some of the flaws of the Nabaztag that I’ve described here. If I can take it out of its rabbit body and put it in something a bit more attractive and use the API to create something that I’ll use regularly then it could be a winner.