Tl;dr
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Yes, it’s as simple as that: this is a reader app that merges several different news sources (which includes facebook, twitter, feedly, feedbin and app.net) into one convenient place for binge reading.
And so an era ends.
I’ve been using Feedly as an alternative because the mobile apps are quite good and the website is a “prettier” google reader. And they actually listen to the users and implement requested features. Also, it seems my Mac RSS app of choice, Reeder, will soon have support for it, so I probably won’t miss Google Reader that much.
The news came as a shock, at least for me: Google decided that Google Reader will be shut down as of July, 1st. A lot of reasons have been flying around, with the official statement being that Google needs to focus on fewer products and some saying that they need the engineering team behind Google Reader to start working on Google’s social products (read, Google+). To this, I say: what engineering team?
As far as I can tell, Google Reader hasn’t been updated in ages. Nothing (or close to it) has changed for the last months, if not years. It seems to be, for better or for worse, a finalized product. And if they say the use has been declining, I’m guessing that there isn’t even a storage or server use problem. So, what has its team been working on?
I really don’t get it, but then again, this is and has always been a free product, so we can’t actually demand anything from Google other than a clean way to export our feeds, which they already provide.
When I close the lid of my Macbook I usually just assume it will go to sleep as expected. This one time, however, when I got back to my office and opened the lid I noticed the Mac was absurdly hot for a computer that has just been in sleep mode.
I decided to test it again and close the lid. To my surprise, the usual flashing light on the macbook didn’t flash at all. It just remained steadily lit. At first, I thought it was some hung app that was causing this so I decided to close every app and check if there was some process using the CPU heavily, but that wasn’t the case. I even tried rebooting and still that didn’t solve the problem. I checked the power settings and nothing pointed to it being the responsible for the sleep mode prevention.
WebGL is starting to draw quite a lot of attention as a simple way to display 3D-rendered scenes on your browser and since it is now supported by the major browsers, it is accessible enough for anyone who wants to try it.
However, if your browser of choice on the Mac is Safari you’ll most likely see an error when trying to access a website with WebGL-based content. This is because Safari does not support WebGL by default and it is not that clear how you get it working on the Mac. In fact, the extension is “hidden” in the Safari settings and you need to perform this two-step process to activate it:
- First got to the “Preferences…” menu and in the “Advanced” tab check the option “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. This will add a new menu at the menu bar with the word “Develop” on the bar. Shocking, I know!
- Then in this newly added Develop menu, choose the option “Enable WebGL”, et voilá!
Mind you this does not work for Safari on Windows. To view WebGL-based content on Windows, you may want to consider using Chrome or Firefox.
The outrage on Twitter today regarding Tweetbot for Mac‘s pricing point of $20 is actually misplaced. It’s not Tapbots‘ fault, it’s Twitter’s fault.
I’ve been using Tweetbot since it first debuted on the iPhone, then on the iPad and finally when they started letting users try out their alpha version for Mac OS X. It may not be the best or the most complete Twitter client out there but it’s definitely the most suitable for my needs and tastes. When I saw the amount at which they decided to price the app today, I wasn’t shocked or surprised, I simply recognized that the time for the first victim of Twitter’s asinine hate towards third-party apps has come.
It’s easy to understand: because Twitter has decided to introduce a user limit on third-party apps, Tapbots doesn’t have the potential to capitalize on their development over time as more users would buy their app at a smaller price. Instead, since they already know the maximum amount of users they’re going to have, they needed to price their app in a way that that maximum amount of users would be enough to cover the costs of development (and some). And because of that, everybody loses.
What really disturbs me is Twitter’s position on this matter. If it wasn’t for third-party apps, Twitter wouldn’t be where it is today. It’s true they need to fuel their website’s traffic to monetize their platform but to piss on the group of people that made it possible, it’s just dumb. For me, once my Tweetbot beta version app’s token expires, I’ll probably stop using Twitter on a regular basis (I loathe their website and I still don’t know if my use of Twitter justifies buying a $20 app) and just use Mountain Lion’s native features to post and receive mentions/messages.
My 14 months old SSD has started to act up presenting some occurrences of bad blocks to a point that yesterday my Macbook didn’t even boot. So, I decided to buy a new one with more space (since they’re getting so cheap now) and after a few hours, thanks to Time Machine, I had my whole setup working again just as it was.
Apple is well known for having developed great products that are well ahead of their competitors but the simplicity of Time Machine is just amazing. It’s one of those awesome features that you wish you never have to use, but you’re glad it’s there to help you when you need it.
Following up on some Raspberry Pi setup notes, I’ve been trying to use it as a media server, but besides the basic stuff, I’ve been unable to use the RPi to its full potential so far. Basically, I installed RaspBMC, which is an XBMC build designed specifically for the RPi, and it works pretty much right away. For the basic stuff anyway…
View of Sintra’s palace from my home using my telescope and the iPhone.