An Offline Google Reader For My iPod Touch

As you may know, I recently decided I couldn’t wait any longer for my iPhone (I’m waiting until my T-Mobile contract expires), so I bought an iPod Touch instead. For the most part, this has turned out rather well. I can now try a lot of the iPhone apps that are available today with the exception of those that are location-based and require the iPhone’s GPS. Since most places I go have Wi-Fi, the lack of “internet everywhere” hasn’t been a huge drawback except for on a few occasions like our recent road trip to Palm Beach, where I was stuck playing games and surfing the horrid little browser on my Blackberry Pearl.

Yesterday, it occurred to me that an offline RSS reader would be an ideal app to add to my iPod Touch since reading through feeds is one of my primary activities…in life, it seems. (That has to change by the way, I want my life back). What would be even better than an offline RSS reader, I decided, would be an offline RSS reader that synced with my Google Reader account. I didn’t imagine this concoction even existed, but I searched through the app store anyway.

And then, there it was! An RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. It’s called Byline and it’s available in the app store for $9.99. Now normally, I don’t purchase paid applications, but this one sounded too good to be true.

Unfortunately, it was.

After setting up my account, the app began archiving 58 items. 58?, I wondered…why only 58 when I have over 900 feeds in my Google Reader? I can blow through 50 items in a matter of minutes! Then it occurred to me to delve into the settings. Surely, there’s a setting that says “take my whole dang reader offline,” right? Well, no. You can specify how many “new” items should display: 25 (the default), 50, 75, 100, or 200. I changed that to 200.  There’s also a setting under “offline browsing” to display “new items,” which is strangely set to “off” by default. I turned that on, too.

Now the app is archiving 376 items. (Where is it getting these numbers?) Although that’s better, it’s still not my entire set of feeds. And since there’s no way to customize which folders/tags are archived, who knows what I’ll get. I can’t browse by tags either, whether online or off.

While I am somewhat grateful that an offline Google Reader even exists, my affection for what could have been an amazing application is tempered by the fact that, quite frankly, it’s doing a half-a**ed job. I realize that not everyone would want to wait while 1000+ items are archived, but if I’m planning ahead for an extended period when I’m going to be away from Wi-Fi (road trip, airline flight, etc.), I see no reason why I can’t specify that in the settings and then wait patiently.

I guess I’m still in search of a decent offline Google Reader, then. Any other suggestions?

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I guess Apple forgot that not everyone uses a Mac.

Vista users got a nasty surprise when they went to upgrade to iTunes 8: a Blue Screen of Death, aka a BSOD. Say what you want about Windows, but I haven’t seen BSODs on my home machines since the early days of XP.

What’s Causing the BSOD?

You can follow this thread on this Apple forum to read the growing list of posts written by increasingly frustrated users. At one point, an Apple rep “Roy B” jumped in to offer assistance, but his questions clearly show that the issue caught Apple completely off guard:

Hello all,

If you are experiencing this BSOD when you have an iPod connected with iTunes 8 installed, please follow these steps and email me <royb@apple.com> with your answers:

    * Look in the Programs and Feature Control Panel. Do you have Logitech Setpoint software installed?
    * If so, what version is it? (To see version info in Programs and Features, right-click the column header, choose More, and put a tick mark by Version)
    * Does the issue go away if you remove the Logitech software and reboot the computer?

After his initial question originally posted on 9-9-08, neither he nor any other Apple representative has made an appearance in the thread. Instead, the posters in the thread have been trying to help each other out. The latest workaround they’ve discovered seems to be unplugging any HP Printers you have installed. That fixes the issue for many people, but not all.

ZDNet’s Ed Bott looks at the issue in more detail, and determines that:

STOP errors can only be caused by kernel-level drivers or system services. A poorly written program can crash itself but not the entire system. So how can a supposedly simple software update cause a fatal crash?

Maybe because this isn’t a simple software update. Once again, Apple is using its automatic update process to deliver massive amounts of new software to users, including a device driver that has a long and checkered history of causing the Blue Screen Of Death to appear. And it’s delivering this massive payload without even a pretense of proper disclosure and without asking consent from its users.

He goes on to test his system and his tests reveal that the driver GEARAspiWDM.sys is the culprit. Apparently, this driver is known for causing BSODs, which begs the question, why on earth would Apple push this driver to Windows machines?

Where’s the QA? 

One of the posters on the thread wonders, “…there’s not a single person in Apple’s QA dept with an HP printer and Vista?” Another scoffs,  “Apple needs to “invest more in QA and less in these events..”

It seems like Apple is learning the hard way that when you gain market share and popularity, you also gain a much wider user base..and when that’s the case, you’re dealing with thousands of systems running software and hardware configurations in a million different ways.

But the real question here is where’s Apple QA department on all this? Did they drop the ball or is this the kind of error that could have happened to anyone?

More importantly, where is the “official” response from the company? Perhaps, like with MobileMe, they’re going to wait until the situation gets really bad before they speak up.

On a personal note, I’m irritated that Apple is still auto-selecting Safari for me every time there’s an update. I don’t want Safari and it should not be checked by default. Or if it is, I should be able to tell it “no” one time and have it stop nagging me.

Sigh. At least this update will include an opportunity to uninstall MobileMe. Again, I’m not thrilled that they pushed MobileMe down to machine without my consent. An extra icon in my Control Panel for a service I never asked for nor use? Why is it again that Apple gets to have such a great reputation? They are just downright sneaky. If Microsoft pulled this kind of stuff, they would be accused of “bundling,” but Apple does it and everyone makes excuses for them.

As you know, I still have a Blackberry as my phone. I can’t get a 3G iPhone until my T-Mobile contract expires next year, so I opted for an iPod Touch instead. Since I’m stuck using the BBerry when wi-fi isn’t available, I’m interested in finding apps that can do what the iPhone/iPod Touch can do. Although they don’t even come close in terms of usability, speed, and sheer glamour, there are a few apps that get me through the wi-fi dead spots. I’ve already got a flickr app for my blackberry, a Facebook Blackberry app, a new-and-improved Twitterberry client, and a funky browser from Zumobi.

Recently, I came across an app called BBMetaBlog. Although designed for Lotus Domino, it apparently works with WordPress or Movable Type (or any blog that uses the MetaWeblog API). I haven’t tried it out yet, but I think I’ll install it in case I get the urge to tap out my thoughts on the tiny keyboard of my Pearl. It’s worth noting that other blogging platforms offer Blackberry apps, too - there’s the TypePad Mobile BlackBerry app and Blogger for BlackBerry for those that use Google’s blogging system. However, for the 90% of the tech world that already switched to iPhone, the WordPress iPhone app is the tool to have. Now, if only we had a decent keyboard with which to use it.

I bought an iPod Touch. Now, you may be wondering why a social media enthusiast like myself is out there buying a iPod Touch instead of an iPhone, and the truth is that it came down to cold, hard cash.

The problem was that both my husband and I have a T-Mobile account and neither of our contracts are up until February of next year. So in order to get an iPhone, I would either have to pony up the full asking price of the phone ($600) or pay the termination fee ($200) and then purchase the iPhone ($200) with the new AT&T contract. While the second option seems the most reasonable, both my husband and I agreed that we wouldn’t switch to AT&T until we can both cancel our T-Mobile contracts. The last thing we wanted is two cell phone bills for the next 6+ months. Also, when you’re trying to be frugal, it’s very hard to justify spending $600 or $400 on something that would only be $200 if you could be patient and wait.

Anyone who knows me, though, will know that being patient is not one of my strong suits. I am actually known in my family as the one who has shaking Christmas presents down to a science. And when shaking is unsuccessful, I will pull a corner back and take a peek. (For the record, I am now no longer allowed to touch any presents prior to opening them.)

So of course I’ve been looking for an angle that would allow me to get my hands on an iPhone for sometime. Unfortunately, my husband, newly pragmatic when it comes to money management, only saw the waste of spending the extra money and had no interest in the absolute and total joy that accompanies the holding of a shiny new device in my greedy little hands.

Enter the iPod Touch. The $300 8 GB iPod Touch.

I would be lying if I said that this article didn’t put the thought into my head. I wondered, if what I’m really looking to do is demo some darn apps and browse a few iPhone enabled websites like FFtoGo.com, then isn’t the Touch is all I really need? (That is, ahem, for now).

After convincing my husband of the practicality of this purchase (I can sell it in February to pay for the iPhone!), it was off to Target. Today, I’m the proud owner of the nifty little device and I get to play with a lot, if not all, of the apps that the iPhone owners are cooing about.

Am I still getting the iPhone come February? Heck yes. But at least I have something to tide me over until then.

Oh, and why is this a “bad, bad thing?” Because the husband wants to keep the device for himself now. That brings us up to $500 by the time I get the iPhone. So much for saving money.

You know how this goes – you mark it for later and then don’t get around to it. Maybe these wouldn’t have filled out an entire blog post or maybe there’s not that much to say about them, but they’re worth a mention nonetheless. They’re kind of awesome. This is no spliced in del.icio.us link list – I killed that long ago, please go do the same. This is a list of worthy links.

I’ve done this before, but it’s not a regular feature. Anyway, here we go:

• I found some hacker’s blog with a tip on how to get a 3G iPhone for $199 without a contract. Totally exploiting a loophole. My guess is that loophole is closed now, but I’m not certain. Anyone want to try it? It’s sort of a lot of work and probably illegal, so I think I’ll just wait to buy one later. 
• From CNet, a post on gAttach: “gAttach is a small utility that reassigns Gmail as the default mail account from Windows documents. With gAttach installed, selecting Send from Windows Explorer, Firefox, and Microsoft Office automatically attaches the files to a Gmail composition instead of opening a new e-mail in your mail client.” Oh hello! I totally needed that.
• From DownloadSquad: Last.fm integration into geeky media player, VLC. The pre-release of VLC 0.9.0 Media Player for both Windows and Mac now supports Last.fm (Audioscrobbler). To enable Last.fm support in the 0.9.0 release, enter your username in the preferences pane under Audioscrobber.
• You’ve seen FriendZone but have you seen FriendVenn? FriendVenn is a FriendFeed app that divides your relationships into a venn diagram of people who you subscribe to who don’t subscribe to you, people who both subscribe to you and who you subscribe to, and people who only subscribe to you.
• Another excellent FriendFeed script from the man who brought you the better recommended page and the better subscribed to me script. It’s the FriendFeed Profile. This script adds a user profile section on FF user pages. It retrieves Twitter and LinkedIn info if available and allows customization of which fields to display by editing the script and setting the variables at the top. Now I can figure out who all of you people really are. Nice!

A friend of mine recently asked me for my thoughts on Apple’s MobileMe. Apparently, he wasn’t aware of my big conflict of interest. However, after some time, I thought, why not? At the very least I can share my thoughts about why I won’t be using it, and why you probably will.

Mobile Me

For those of you who haven’t heard, MobileMe is Apple’s new sync/cloud storage platform. Whether you’re on your Mac, PC, iPhone, or iPod Touch, you can access your email, contacts, calendars (and via “push,” too). An online photo gallery and an “iDisk” are also available as online storage spaces for your files. Taken at face value, MobileMe sounds great, doesn’t it? And for many people, it will be. Like all Apple products, MobileMe’s UI is beautiful and easy to use, but MobileMe shares another trait with Apple products, too: it’s a tightly closed platform.

MobileMe will quickly lock you into Apple’s walled garden – and you’ll pay to get in there, too. For $99 you get 20 GB of storage or you can get the family pack for $149…per year. For every 20 extra GBs you need, you’ll also need another $50. And if you already use another email address, like your own domain or email from another free webmail provider like Gmail or Yahoo, you’ll have to give that up, too, or at least learn how to forward, because MobileMe requires an @me.com address.

Of course, if you’re already an Apple user with a Macbook, iPhone, iPod Touch, and whatever else Apple invents for you to buy, you’ve probably already signed up to be notified about MobileMe and are eagerly awaiting the day you can begin using it.

Live Mesh

Microsoft, on the other hand, like the nerdy, older guy in the Mac vs. PC commercials, has been busy coding a developer’s platform called Live Mesh that’s cool, but sort of secretive, too. I mean, with blog posts like this, it’s clear that they’re not even talking to the consumer anymore, so only true computer geeks are still listening. And that’s really too bad because, like all the complex tools that have come out of Microsoft throughout the years, Mesh could also be the next great thing if they could just hire a UI guy to slap some adorable little icons all over it.

OK, I jest. Don’t get me wrong – UI is very important stuff. Arguably, one of the most important things to the consumer these days. Yet it seems we’ve decidedly moved away from a time when caring about what was under the hood was important. Who builds their own PCs anymore? Who replaces their menus and file explorers with crazy, downloadable replacement programs? Who configures the heck out of their tools, applications, and settings so they have a truly personalized computing environment? I guess just me. I’m the one. Everyone else seems perfectly fine to deal with the lovely, yet homogenized world that Apple has created for them. And when something doesn’t work right - like, say, Flash on the iPhone, then it’s just somebody else’s fault.

Meanwhile, Live Mesh is being quietly ignored as the blogosphere drools over iPhone 2.0 (Yes, I’m getting one. That’s not the point). The point is, the blogosphere has given up on Microsoft. The Apple fans (check the comments) are downright terrifyingly vicious in their devotion. Hey, I love my Apple stuff, and if I was rich like you, I’d probably supplement my computing world with a bit more of it; but for now, I still believe there’s more to tech than just what comes out of Apple.

Anyway, back to Mesh. Since no one is bothering to explain it that well, here’s my go at it. It’s a platform not a service. It’s not a web app. It’s not a website where you go and upload files so you can say you offer “cloud computing.”

Or, even better, to quote Steve, “MobileMe could be "built" on Mesh. Unlikely of course, but the opposite isn’t true.” Or yes, even a service like Twitter could run on Mesh.

But for now, Mesh is about sync and access anywhere. I right-click a folder and choose “Add to Mesh.” Now it’s anywhere I have access to computer. A PC, but Mac and Mobile are still coming soon.

And it’s not some crazy proprietary .NET rehash, either. Says John Carroll, “they aren’t proposing protocols for data exchange that would be alien to most web developers. HTTP, RSS, REST, ATOM and JSON are are standard protocols, and though FeedSync may be new-ish, it is an XML protocol based on ATOM and RSS…This is a real shift, in other words, for Microsoft. They are starting to realize that it is better to be the generalized platform used even on non-Microsoft platforms ”

So when Mesh doesn’t work on the iPhone, guess what? It’s not going to be because it wasn’t using the proper protocols. It will be because Steve Jobs didn’t want it to.

Anyway, if what I know about Mesh really happens one day, it will be totally cool. Revolutionary. But then we’re back to the secret thing again. Sigh.

So I await the tongue-lashing from my friends who will once again depress me by explaining in detail all the reasons why Mesh is going to fail.

They have no idea, but really Microsoft is either going to live up to this:

….or it will fail big-time, but for this round, there’s no gray area.

So, excuse me for hoping that they still have them in them to do the former.

Yesterday, when the big Apple iPhone hoopla and hype sent floods of traffic to popular technology news web sites, blogs, and services, we all expected Twitter to go down in flames. They didn’t do so, a feat so downright unbelievable that Michael Arrington of TechCrunch even took time to congratulate them via a blog post on TC, saying:

Well, they made it, and I applaud them. To be fair, they did have some minor downtime (minor by Twitter standards) - 4% of requests failed. But it was close enough to call it win, and I hereby give them their due. Twitter failed to fail, and I am a happy user today.

Well, maybe you didn’t see the FAIL whale of death yesterday on our beloved, but struggling, service’s homepage, but to call this a success it a bit of stretch. That’s because Twitter’s uptime came at the expense of just about everything else.

As the Twitter Status blog documented, they began with temporarily disabling the “replies,” “everyone,” and “archive” tabs. Then they dropped the API request limit to a painfully slow 10 per hour and asked everyone to configure their clients to not pull more frequently than once every 6 minutes. For a huge online event like the iPhone 2.0 announcement, occurring in real-time no less, having to deal with Twhirl timeouts was simply unacceptable.

After the “Stevenote” was over, they slowly began restoring functionality to the site, tab by tab, but turning off other features along the way like “track via SMS.” The API limit was bumped up to 20 per hour. Then, of course, there was a network problem.

Now, granted, none of this came as a surprise – Twitter at least had the decency to warn us of their impending “gray mode,” which let them shed load quickly during this peak time…but quite frankly, I couldn’t be bothered with them when there was iPhone news to be heard.

Instead, I followed the keynote in the VentureBeat WWDC Livestream FriendFeed room, where updates came fast and furious and no downtime was had. Now, sure, you could say that the FriendFeed service is more stable because it has fewer users, but I like to think that it’s because guys from Google know how to build things that scale.

It’s funny – when I describe Twitter to non-geeks, I often refer to it as sort of an “offline IM” – who knew how accurate that would be? For me at least, yesterday proved that when information matters, it’s FriendFeed for the win.

Oh, and in case you’re curious, I watched FriendFeed via my Firefox browser sidebar via the My Social 24×7 extension which is becoming my favorite way to track FriendFeed. If it had an auto-update feature, I would be complete.

Oh, I needed this! I’ve got MP3s and MP4s and WMAs and god knows what else filling up gigs of storage at my house, thanks to a little sneakernet-ing not to mention ripping nearly my entire CD collection to my PC. And even though both Windows Media Player, iTunes, and my copy of Media Monkey all check online databases to find the metadata for the tunes, none of them are 100% perfect and mistakes happen. Plus, for some reason, there are those songs that they just can’t identify. And when you’ve filled up an 80 GB hard drive with MP3s and are still growing, the more automation, the better.

So when I discovered TagScanner, a free download that can help me organize my music, I was thrilled. The program can import tag info from freedb.org, Amazon, or TrackType.org, plus you can have it auto-generate tags from files and folders or rename your files based on tag info. The program supports tons of file types too, including:

MP3, OGG, Musepack, Monkey Audio, FLAC, AAC, OptimFROG, SPEEX, WavePack, TrueAudio, WMA, MP4 audio files

as well as

ID3 1.0/1.1/1.2/2/2.3/2.4, APE v1 and v2, WMA, MP4, and Vortbis tags, comments, and metadata.

Now I haven’t tested this out yet (this looks like a weekend project for me), but I’m hoping this will be the app that finally gets my library in shape.

A man who goes by the name of "DVD Jon," gained fame for cracking both the DVD code and Apple’s FairPlay. Now he’s offering a new software application, called DoubleTwist, that allows for sharing of any music, photo, or video file on any portable media player as well across social networks. The CEO of DoubleTwist, Monique Farantzos, recruited Jon (Jon Lech Johansen) to build the software, which he and 10 others have worked on for 8 months.

How easy is the software? Says Jon, "the goal is to make something your parents can use." To use the software, a device is plugged into a Windows XP or Vista PC (Mac will be later) and DoubleTwist will recognize it and all the media files on the device. Using the software, the file can then be selected, dragged, and dropped into DoubleTwist to be synched up to a separate device, or shared with your friends on DoubleTwist.

The app will also work with Facebook and soon all OpenSocial platforms, allowing users to share media across social networks. Using the Facebook app TwistMe, Facebook users can drag and drop media into a box on another user’s Facebook profile. The friend will then see the shared files show up in their DoubleTwist client. They also automatically add audio and video files you receive from friends to your iTunes library. Shared photos will also be added if you enable iTunes photo sync.

DoubleTwist currently recognizes the following file types:

• Video: 3gp (used by most cell phones), MPEG4 (.mp4, .m4v), wmv, avi and MPEG2 (.mpg, .mpv, .mpeg)
• Audio: mp3, aac/m4a, wma, wav
• Pictures: jpg, gif, png, bmp

DoubleTwist currently supports the following devices:

• Nokia N Series phones
• Sony Ericsson Walkman & Cybershot phones
• LG Viewty phones
• Windows Mobile 5.0/6.0 phones (e.g. Treo, HTC, Palm)
• Sony PSP
• Amazon Kindle

DoubleTwist will also recognize your iTunes playlists and will detected which ones are DRM’d. To decode them, the software plays the song in the background (without volume) while re-recording the files as MP3s. (This sounds like a good way to convert your iTunes files to MP3s, too, doesn’t it?)

You can download DoubleTwist for free, spyware-free from here.

(found on Cnet)

Podchains is a web service that lets you organize online media like podcasts and videos into a playlist. This playlist can then be synced to your mp3 player either through iTunes or any other podcast-catching application. To use Podchains, you sign up for an account and then you can quickly save files from the net by using their bookmarklet to tag them as your surf. When you add files to create your “podchain,” you are also given a link to your feed. This link can then shared with your friends so they can subscribe, too. For podcast newbies, Podchains could be a simple way to run a podcast - you could just upload the files to your own servers, then add them to your podchain. The service can then take care of creating the RSS feed for you.