So I pulled my Windows machine out of the closet the other day and hooked it up to the net and a monitor and all that—I wanted to try out some Windows aggregators, see what features they have, see how they’re solving some UI problems, etc.

And I had some stunningly bad luck. Almost every single app I tried crashed on launch or right after displaying their main window.

My machine is a 500 MHz Dell box running Windows 98. It’s up-to-date with security patches, and it has .NET 1.1 installed. But... apparently it’s a bit too stone age. Fair enough: I’m not complaining, just learning a lesson.

Anyway... of the aggregators I did get to work, I was struck by how Windows-y they are. Wizards for adding subscriptions!

That’s not a criticism, by the way. Windows apps should have wizards, they should be Windows-y, just like Mac apps should be Mac-like. (And Linux apps should be... GNOME-y? KDE-ish?)

This experience was a reminder for me of how unimportant the underlying syndication formats are, in a way. What percent of time does an aggregator developer spend on RSS and Atom parsing code? 50%? 25%? 10%?

I figure it’s somewhere less than 1%.

The rest of the time is taken up with things like data storage, networking, and user interface. But mostly user interface. Not just implementing—which is often easy—but designing user interface, which is difficult.

What this means, finally, is that a Windows aggregator developer is foremost a Windows developer, and secondly an RSS/Atom developer. Similarly for Mac and Linux developers.
11:36 pm #

There’s a piece of software I use that has this Labels menu that freaks me out.

It’s okay until I look at the Yellow label. Then it becomes like one of those weird left-brain/right-brain experiments. I can feel the conflict in my head. It’s like a denial-of-service attack—my brain goes into a loop.

I don’t know how this happened—I don’t recall ever customizing anything label-related.
04:16 pm #

Are RSS aggregators pretty much there, just needing some tweaks and small features—or at they still at the very beginning of their evolution, with a long road still ahead?

This question was asked on the NetNewsWire beta testing list. It’s a good question.

Answer: aggregators still have a long road ahead. What you see now is just the beginning.

I have an idea of some of the things you’ll see in 2004 (not just in NetNewsWire but in aggregators in general). So consider this as Brent’s psychic predictions for 2004.

1. Atom syndication support. Some aggregators already have this, and I suspect most will by mid-2004.

2. Synching. The idea is to synchronize not only your subscription lists but also the read/unread status of individual headlines—and to make it so it works between different apps, even apps running on different operating systems.

3. Easier subscribing. One of the problems for new users is the problem of subscribing to feeds. The “feed” URL scheme is a step forward here, because it makes it so you can subscribe to feeds directly from your browser. It also means instead of lots of ways to do this, which is inherently confusing, aggregator developers and users can collapse it down to one way. (I suspect there will be other good ideas too—especially in the realm of finding feeds.) Making all this easy for new users is a high priority.

Anyway... individual aggregators, NetNewsWire included, will add lots of other new features not listed above. The above are just the things I predict aggregators will do in common for 2004. I expect lots of innovation to come from all over, but I can’t predict what those innovations will be.

Years from now aggregators will be like email apps: we’ll know what an aggregator should do and what the UI conventions are. But for now we get to be creative, try new ideas, see what sticks. So—my last prediction—I expect 2004 to be fun.
02:06 pm #

Richard Soderberg figured out how put CSS in RSS. And Joi Ito is using this technique in his feed.

Some people think it’s cool, others don’t. I suspect an obvious feature request will be for aggregators to notice when this technique is being used and be able to turn it on and off.
04:56 am #