Standing Mobile

IE 7 and RSS Love

Internet Explorer 7 is set to release soon (Yahoo in fact has already made an announcement).  The two hottest features: tabbed browsing and RSS!!!  This is a brilliant thing for RSS and widespread consumer adoption.

The release of IE7 is monumental for the RSS space; Mike Arrington doesn’t think so (see his quote below), but I do!

“Many people have said that RSS in IE7 will mean an explosion of RSS reading amongst non-technical users. I am not so sure that’s the case at all, but more on that later.”

There are several groups I am involved in outside of work that are technology related.  One of those groups is the Boulder .NET User Group.  I recently asked the group (ALL DEVELOPERS MIND YOU) who knew what RSS was…. The answer was less than 10%.  Wow! That just blew me away and this theme carries across all my groups.  Ask non-technical folks what RSS is and they will likely have no clue.

So, as more and more folks discover the power of RSS thru IE 7, they will search out the best of bread aggregators for all their appliances… this will also be good for NewsGator.  And of course, these folks will want RSS on their devices – and NewsGator Go! will fit the bill!
 
Right on IE7.  Give it a go – I have been using the beta for months and just love it!

UPDATE: Dean Hachamovitch announced the release of IE 7 today.  Way to go IE 7 team!

1 comment October 18th, 2006

NewsGator Go! – Trimming the Fat

One of the issues that power users face when trying to consume their RSS feeds on mobile devices is the sheer volume of data… A typical power user may have hundreds of feeds and thousands of unread articles.  On a side, I recently heard Guy Kawasaki say that he has 21K RSS feeds – Wow!

Now, I have built NewsGator Go! in such a way that it can handle this load.  But the fact of the matter is that if you have this much data, it is going to take time to fetch and it is going to take time to load.  This is a result of slower networks and limited device memory which forces me to do some creative File I/O (expensive on mobile) in order to handle large amounts of data.

But do not fear, there is a way to address this issue.  Like I said, if you want all your feeds pumped to your device you can do that, but it may make sense to whittle down your mobile feed set to something that is  more manageable.  This is a piece of cake with NewsGator Go!  It is all based around NewsGator locations!

Here is what you need to do:
    1. Go to NewsGator Online and sign in
    2. Go to My Settings | Edit Locations

   

    3. You will see a NewsGator Go! location that gets automagically created for you.  The name will look like this NGMobile-yourdevicename

       

        a. There is a great option here to enable/disable automatically include new feeds to this location that you should be aware of (I prefer to have new feeds added to my mobile and I can remove later if necessary)
        b. More importantly, you can modify the feed list.  By default all your existing feeds get added to this mobile location so all you have to do is uncheck the feeds you don’t want to show up on your mobile and you are good to Go!

 

This feature kicks butt!  Check it out.

12 comments October 17th, 2006

Stream of News – NewsGator Style

Dave Winer has recently gained much attention over his River of News mobile reader, and this is certainly a good move for mobile and RSS.  Here is a screenshot of the BBC’s River courtesy of Dave’s service.  Very nice!

 

A River of News may not be the ticket for me and others for differing reasons… I prefer a richer experience and a more structured view of my feeds. But the River of News does have its place and folks are asking for this feature.  In the next version of NewsGator Go!, I will be incorporating this concept with a slightly different spin… I call it a Stream of News.

I can let the river flow for all my news by selecting the root folder and opening up the fire hose, see below…

Or I can just flow the news at the folder level and read just a tributary of the river… ie, the stream.  And of course, marking articles read synchronizes the article with all NewsGator products.  I can also chose to remove the articles from the list as they are read (my preference) w/o post backs.  Here is what the Stream of News looks like on NewsGator Go!

I hope this helps and improves the NewsGator Go! experience!

4 comments October 17th, 2006

Yahoo Answers on Mobile

My oldest daughter started kindergarden this year and also started playing soccer. Well she kind of just watches right now, but we’re working on that.

I know one of the dads, Andy, from the local tech scene. Andy is VP of Technology for a local software shop and is an incredibly sharp cat. When we start chatting at the games, we talk about things like RSS, YouTube, P2P, streaming, etc. Now, I also know a few other soccer dads. Steve is the team manager of the Excel Sports Cycling Team. Steve, his teammates, and I have crossed paths on many occasions racing bikes. When Steve and I chat, we talk about criteriums, carbon fiber, AT, power, EPO, components, etc. John, another dad, and I go back a ways. We were initially connected through a mutual friend. We have threatened to go fly fishing on many occasions over the years, and when we talk we have our own set of terminology.

So, my point is that each conversation has its own geek speak that to an outsider sounds completely Greek. For me that geek speak which is foreign to me is soccer. I played football my whole life and the rules and lingo in soccer leave me baffled. When folks are talking about soccer, I feel like a shmoe and sort of drift off. I wish I knew more about the game.

There is clearly a problem here looking for a solution. I have my cell phone with me and would love to be able look up some of the soccer terms on the fly, get answers, and get involved in that conversation.
To that end, on the way to Emma’s first game we stopped at Barnes and Noble. I picked up a cup of coffee and an issue of Business 2.0. One of the articles was about Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Answers had 12 million uniques in June (YouTube had 13 million). This is clearly a hot and valuable web property and for a reason. It is a great resource for learning things in a hurry.

I could instantly become a soccer expert with Yahoo Answers on my cell phone. However, Yahoo Answers is just unusable in my mobile browser – the page took forever to load ( 3+ minutes for the landing page, and 4+ minutes to get a lis of related questions… yikers) and the extensive scrolling made the experience too painful. I could run the Answers site through a transcoder and get the page load times down, but I still end up scrolling and having to enter some long munged up URL. But not to worry… I spent a few weekends and evenings building the Mobile Ask mashup with the help of the Yahoo API, and it is now here for you!

I can now be a real time Cliff Clavin (or at least impress my buddies) no matter where I am or what the topic of conversation… and you can too (just don’t be as damn annoying as Cliff)! You can get a Windows Mobile Smartphone or Pocket PC or Pocket PC build here. IT IS A SIMPLE BUT POWERFUL MOBILE APPLICATION and it is FREE!
Check out the screen shots to see what it is all about:

  

And get Mobile Ask here, now!  I hope this helps you in some way…

21 comments October 12th, 2006

Hopping a Sleeping Man

I drove my Trek Madone into the garage over the weekend – ouch… well, my wife was driving but I was in the car, so I take all the blame as I put it there in the first place. Some carbon fiber splintered and my heart fell to the floor. Major bummer.

While I am getting that all in order, I have been riding the cross bike… a fine steel Kelly. Today I left Boulder in the dark at about 5:30 am on a crisp morning and rolled out on some of the bike paths. The cross bike is not as fast as the Madone, but it does allow me to get off the streets and onto some dirt!

I did some Google Map satellite action on Monday and found some really interesting routes w/ lots of off road action form Boulder to Denver… this morning I took one of those routes. It was an insanely fun ride with a fair amount of mud and lots of air time.

But the best part of the ride came right at the end… I was flying down 20th street heading into downtown Denver and saw what looked like a camouflage jacket in the middle of the bike path that dips under an overpass. I was cooking and getting ready to bunny hop this sucker and realized @ the last minute it was some dude crashed out in a camo sleeping bag. I backed off… I shoulda hopped the sleeping man.

Add comment October 11th, 2006

Publishing Movies On the Go

My wish to have my wife and daughter video and stream their experience at the CU football game may not be too far off in the weeds.

Cell phones are going to be WLAN enabled, cities are getting unwired, and folks are already capturing video on their phones (I haven’t had French class since High School, but it looks like there is a festival around videos shot on mobile devices) and there are plenty of options for serving up streamed content.

Add comment October 10th, 2006

What I Want for XMas

… or maybe for my birthday since it is on Monday. What I want is a piece of software for my Windows Mobile phone. I’ll get to that in a minute.

This part of the story sucks big time but is related… Tim DeBoom dropped off case of Red Bull on my porch yesterday (the kids do NOT need this, so I will be good to go w/ Red Bull for a while). Maybe I can find some wings and build this software myself. Tim is going off the grid for a bit, and I guess won’t be needing as much Red Bull. Tim is a two time Hawaii Ironman champ and was hoping to kick some butt there again this year as the favorite, but a foot injury has him sidelined. He is totally bummed so he hit the road with his wife Nicole to get away while the event goes on without him. Tim is the coolest dude you’d ever meet. If you didn’t know he was one of the greatest athletes to walk the earth, you’d never know it – he certainly would not tell you. Class act guy, and my family is totally bummed out about this. Why does this crap happen to such good people?

(Before my epic ride/run this am I pounded a few Red Bulls – RED BULL #1 and RED BULL #2 and this theme will continue)

Anyway, back to the software… Holly and Emma are the CU Buffs football game right now. Yeh, how jacked up is that. The boys are at home (Asher is being a little shit, so he stays home) and Ava is napping. So, I volunteered to hold down the fort while Holly and Emma get some girl time. RED BULL #3

So here is what I want; I want Holly to be able to whip out her Windows Mobile device, start shooting stuff with the built in camera (some of the game and mostly just them having fun), and stream it to me. I want to see it now (and so would my Mom and Dad and Holly’s folks and you get the idea)… Throw VOIP on top of that and we can have a really interesting interaction. As I express my thoughts here – RED BULL #4

Boulder doesn’t have city wide WiFi yet… yet. But the game is on campus, and I imagine Holly could get a signal and get on w/ my old CU credentials. All the pieces are there. The technology and the Red Bull are in place, so what’s the holdup, hey?

If I could only pull RSS into this somehow, I could add this feature to NewsGator Go! Okay, that’s a stretch.

Just my ramblings as I try to tame the raging boy (hey, he is just like me – what did I expect) and now Ava – she just woke up – time for RED BULL #5

I am amped now… and should be seeking out Red Bull for a sponsorship of my own. Red Bull? You know where to find me.

4 comments October 7th, 2006