Crooked Spin

Jared Kuolt:

In the end it took me about 15 minutes to decide to purchase Rivet. It has fantastic performance and options, without cost to your computer’s performance, all for a mere $18.95…

It’s not often that I spend money on software, but products like Rivet that show an unrivaled level of polish make the decision easy. I want it to work without hassle, and Rivet delivers just that.

Very nice review of Rivet by Jared. I love getting to read write ups like that about my apps.

One neat feature of Cyndicate is the ratings feature. As you read each article you can give it a star rating from 1 to 5. You can then sort and organize articles by their rating. The rating can be set by either having the rating column showing in the article table and clicking in it or by selecting a rating from the Ratings menu that is in the Article menu.

The really cool part of it is that Cyndicate will learn what you like based on the rating and will then automatically rate new articles as they are fetched. This allows you to do really useful stuff like making a smart folder that shows new articles with a 4 or 5 star rating to quickly get caught up with the news that you find most interesting. It can be a huge time savings when you’re trying to cut through the cruft.

The automatic rating system does take a little time to learn your likes and dislikes. The more articles you rate, the more accurate it will become. Remember to mark down articles you don’t like as well as marking up articles you do like. The system works best when you’re telling it both you’re likes and dislikes so that it can weigh the two against each other.

You can think of it like the spam filter in your email client. It get gets better at correctly marking spam the more you mark email as being spam and unmark the emails that it incorrectly marked as spam. The only difference being that Cyndicate takes a little bit more work to teach then email spam. This is do to the nature of the content. We can all pretty much agree that the viagra or mortgage email is spam so they can give some default matching data, but with news articles what you like and dislike can be vastly different then the next guy. Take a political blog for instance, a Republican will mostly likely rate the articles in a very differently, perhaps completely opposite, than what a Democrat might rate the same articles. So have a little bit of patience with it at the start. It will pay off in the long run.

Cyndicate offers another organizational tool that’s similar to the filters features talked about in the last article, smart folder. Smart folders work like filters except that filters move the article to a different folder while smart folders show all messages that match the conditions without moving the articles. The articles will automatically appear and disappear from the smart folder as they meet the conditions of the smart folder.

The biggest, and I’d say the best, use of smart folders is for a temporary alternate view of your articles. Keep regular folders for the long term structure and smart folders short term viewing. A couple common uses it to have a smart folder that shows unread articles from today or one that displays all articles that you have flagged.

Another use of smart folders, and a really powerful one that sets Cyndicate apart from the other news readers, is to make a smart folder that displays articles that are unread and have a rating of 4 or 5. Since articles are being automatically rated as they are received, the smart folder will display the new articles that are most likely to be of interest to you. This is great for the times when you’re running short on time and want to catch up with the news that’s most important to you, leaving the rest of the articles for later when you have more time to read through them.

In the introduction I talk about Cyndicate giving you more control and power over your news, but where does the power come from? A large portion of it come from the combination of folders and filters. The combo of the two allow you to set up how you’d like to view the day’s news and then forget about the day-to-day minutia of managing it. You can sit back and take in all of the info in a manner that makes the most sense to you.

The first step in organizing your news is to set up a folder structure to house the articles. They can range from broad topics like skiing to narrower topics like Telluride skiing and anywhere in-between. You want to set them based on how many articles you’ll be receiving on their subject to keep the numbers to a manageable size. Using sub-folders can help the organization too since you can then start with a broad topic and then get more specific with the subfolders. For example have a Skiing folder with subfolders on Colorado, Utah, and Montana.

Another nice thing about creating sub-folders is that they allow you to easily adjust the granularity. When a parent folder is collapsed, it will show all of its articles plus any articles that are in its sub-folders. So using the skiing example, during the winter it would makes sense to have the folder expanded and view by the sub-folder since the traffic will be heavy. But in the summer when new article are going to be slow, collapse the parent folder and view all of the articles at once.

Once you have your folder structure set up you want to set up filters to automate the sorting of new articles as they are fetched. The most common filters you will make are matching on the feed or the content of the title or body of the article. How you set them up will really depend on the feeds you subscribe to and the way you organize your articles. Using the skiing folder structure from above, you could create a filer that matches on title for each of the states with the action being to move the article into the corresponding folder. Then for feeds that are specific to one location, say Vale’s snow condition feed, make a filter that matches on the feed and moves it to the Colorado folder.

The possibilities of how to organize and filter your feeds are endless. Play around with the options a bit and find out what works best for you.

I’m going to start a series on Cyndicate that will cover features of it that you might not be aware of and tips on using it. My goal is to show you the some of the power built into the app and give an look at the concepts behind it. The later is something that seems to give people the most problems the first time they look at Cyndicate. They try to use it by using the concepts and paradigms that they’ve learned from all of the other new aggregators. Cyndicate takes a different approach that takes a little getting used to, but one you “get” it, you have a lot more power over your daily news.

The biggest difference to understand is how feeds and articles are treated. In other readers, the feed is the main item with articles attached to it. The feed has a bit of control over how long the article lives in the reader and most of the organization is done around it. You group feeds together in folders and don’t have much control over the articles.

Cyndicate takes a much finer grain approach and uses the article itself as the primary unit. The feed is simply a conduit that delivers articles to you. Once you receive that delivery of articles, they are decoupled from the feed and can be acted upon based on their own merits. You no longer have to keep articles together based on the mechanism that delivered them to you. You can now organize based on any criteria that you choose. This can be the author, content, category, or anything else that you wish to use. You have full control. The articles will always act independently no matter what happens to the feed that came from.

Stay tuned. I plan on covering the features give you that control and hopefully some ideas on how to best use it for your own purposes.

In the latest episode of The Mac Developer Roundtable, Andy Matuschak talks about machine learning as a new direction for user interfaces. One of the examples he gives of a good use of it would to tell him in the morning which of the 200 unread articles he should read in the few minutes he has before leaving for class. This is a really good use of machine learning and one I’m happy to say Cyndicate can handle for him (or anyone). The functionality can be achieved by combining two of Cyndicate’s features, automatic ratings and smart folders.

Automatic ratings takes care of the machine learning part of the equation. As you rate articles while reading, Cyndicate learns what you like and don’t like. Then when new articles are received Cyndicate will give it a rating based on your history. Think of it as your email spam filter in reverse. Instead of trying to decide what it spam, it tried to figure out what you would be interested in. The system works really well once you get it trained.

Smart folders are the other part of the equation. Cyndicate’s smart folders include rules to filter based on the article’s rating. So if you make a smart folder with rules to show unread articles and articles with a five star (and maybe four star) ratings you will achieve Andy’s example. Every morning you’ll have a list of four or five star articles to quickly read through that is based on what you’ve liked in the past.

A bomb dropped last week: NetNewsWire is now free. Well, free if you don’t mind giving up you’re privacy. Naturally NewsGator isn’t pushing that fact. It’s buried under all of the PR spin about making money off of their enterprise products and what is being said is being spun some more to make it sound like “free” is an entirely thing.

What you’re not told up front is that NewsGator will now be collecting information about your viewing habits, which articles you save, which you email, etc¹. NewsGator assumes that your privacy is worth only $30 to you². I place a much greater value on mine. Aggregating the data can give some very clear pictures of trends on a wide variety of topics and companies will pay very good money for it. How long until we see on Fox News or CNN “according to NewsGator the blogosphere is abuzz about…”?

Everyone rightfully complained about the Feds lessening our privacy with the PATRIOT Act, but as soon as some company offers a shiny trinket to them for free, concern for our rights as people gets thrown out the window. At least with the PATRIOT Act the chances of me being put under surveillance are low. With NewsGator, it’s guaranteed. No thanks. I’d much rather have the up-front costs on a product and not have usage data collected.

Concerns for my own privacy are one of the main reasons I choose to get a ReplayTV instead of a Tivo. I never liked the idea of Tivo tracking which shows I recorded, how many times I watched, which commercials I skipped - or just as important to marketers - which ones I didn’t skip. They gave the same argument that the data is only being used in aggregate and I didn’t go for it then for the same reason. The data isn’t sent to them in an aggregate form. They receive the individual data on each person and then aggregate it together. It doesn’t take much to keep records of individual use for when the right price is offered for that data or for some rogue employee to take off with it.

Your privacy is something you won’t have to worry about with Cyndicate. We do not, and will
not collect usage data about your viewing habits. Nothing you do gets collected by us³. You and your viewing habits remain completely anonymous not because of our policy that can be changed at any time, but because we never get any information that would allow us to infringe on your privacy. We respect our users rights.

This isn’t to say that privacy is Cyndicate’s only advantage either. It was just the focus of this article. I still believe that Cyndicate offers a superior reading experience due to its organizational features, like full persistence, folders and filters, and some of its more advance features like the automatic rating system. We also still offer full customer support which is another feature Newgator cut with their price change.

Cyndicate’s still my news aggregator of choice and I’m committed to making it an even better product then it already is. We already have a lot of great new features on the drawing board to give our customers even more value for their money.

Footnotes:

1. You can opt out (you’re opted in by default), but if you do you’ll lose some features, like synchronization, according to their FAQ.

3. Cyndicate does use Sparkle+ which allows the user to send back machine stats after opting in. It is off by default and all of the submitted data can be viewed by the user in the Update preference pane. None is usage data and none is personal.

All Cynical Peak Software is 20% off today (December 23th) and 10% for the rest of the month due to MacSanta visiting all the good mac users. Now’s you’re chance to get the best deal we’ve ever offered on Cyndicate and Scorecard. Use the code MACSANTA07 for today’s deal and MACSANTA07TEN for remainder of the month. Be sure to check out the other MacSanta deals too. There’s a lot of great software in his bag.

Cyndicate 1.1 is now available for download from either Cyncial Peak’s website or running Cyndicate’s updater. As with all our point releases, this is a free update for all Cyndicate users. This release is mainly bug fixes with a few nice little features added in like the ability to set what count the dock show, auto-scrolling of the article list when you reach the top or bottom, and video attachments to YouTube’s feeds are now embedded in the article pane.

• Added an option to set the dock to show the count of either all unread, the inbox, or none.
• Added a fix for feeds that have bad text encodings
• Added support for youtube videos listed in the mrss format
• The article list will now auto scroll
• Changed the way favicons are loaded to try to prevent a lock
• Fixed deleting inactive feeds and their articles
• Fixed selection change when moving articles in the feed view
• Fixed automatic downloading
• Fixed delete filters on intel machines

The printer setup utility in Leopard can be a bit frustrating to use. I have a headache right now from it. I’m a low volume printer. Generally I only print out reference material when I’m working on something new that I’m unfamiliar with. Because of that, I hadn’t bothered to set up my printer yet since doing the clean install for Leopard. I needed to print something today, so I finally got around to trying it out.

The problem I had was that the OS would not find the correct drivers for my printer. I use an HP Laserjet 1012 that’s shared via bonjour through an airport express. The add printer function in the printer preference pane would find it with no problems, but it would not list drivers for it in either the auto-discover or select driver.

I went around with it for a bit when finally I decided to move the printer and plug it directly into the machine. It was instantly set-up and ready to go then. Everything worked great. I then hooked everything back up through the airport express. Trying to add the printer now resulted in the correct driver being found automatically for it. So it appears that the driver discovery doesn’t correctly work with a bonjour printer, at least over an express, until the OS has first seen the printer with a direct connection.

On the plus side, I like the new printer pane in Leopard and configuration was great with with the USB connection that most users will use. Everything was automatically set-up and ready go as soon as I plugged in the printer. It was a really good user experience for that type of connection. Hopefully the bonjour set-up will eventually be that smooth.