Ölbaum’s Delirium

A vast majority of fellow geeks is up in arms about the announcement of the end of Google Reader, but I cheered. It’s awesome news. Let me explain:

Google Reader kinda sucked¹ in many ways. It didn’t support authenticated feeds. If you had personal feeds for which you were the only subscriber, like issues assigned to you in your bug tracker or a Pinboard tag, it would only be updated once every 24 hours. And if you didn’t use the system for a week or so (ever heard of holidays?), those personal feeds would stop being updated altogether. That’s the kind of situation where the term UX actually makes sense, in that it’s a shitty experience for the user.

Now you might be inclined to to tell me that if I don’t like it, I should just not use it. I’ll love to, but currently, some 95% of feed readers rely on Google Reader for syncing, and the remaining 5% all suck. What’s ironic is that I don’t even need syncing: I exclusively read feeds in Reeder for iPad. I couldn’t care less (notice the proper use of this difficult expression) if my feed reader couldn’t sync. But those applications don’t just rely on Google Reader for syncing, they require it, plain and simple. So no matter how well done they otherwise are, you remain stuck by Reader’s limitations.

Now that Google Reader is dead, we can hope that existing feed readers won’t be abandoned and will either rely on other services (we’ll probably see a Fever-enabled Reeder for iPad before July 1st) or, more smartly, on no service at all, except if you need syncing. That a lot more than what we could hope for last week.

# Posted by Ölbaum, the wee hours | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

google reader rss atom reeder

# Posted by Ölbaum, late evening | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

offspring, u2

My Time Machine backup (on OS X 10.7) was stuck on Waiting for index to be ready (100) for a long time (it kept logging this once every minute for 20 minutes).

I ended up killing the mds process. I was treated with an Indexer unavailable (200), then another Waiting for index to be ready, then the backup completed successfully:

19.08.2012 14:25:34.270 com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
19.08.2012 14:26:34.352 com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
19.08.2012 14:27:34.429 com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
19.08.2012 14:28:13.502 com.apple.backupd: Indexer unavailable (200)
19.08.2012 14:28:35.520 com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
19.08.2012 14:30:14.957 com.apple.backupd: Copied 2944 files (5.2 MB) from volume filemate.
19.08.2012 14:30:15.574 com.apple.backupd: Copied 2955 files (5.2 MB) from volume 500GB.
19.08.2012 14:30:32.853 com.apple.backupd: Backup completed successfully.

# Posted by Ölbaum, early afternoon | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

10.7, Index, Lion, Mac OS X, Spotlight, Time Machine

I’m aware that this product has not even been rumoured yet and nobody outside Google knows what’s in store, but Smarrow, the result of the acquisition by Google of the Sparrow e-mail client, is already my all-time favourite Gmail/Google Reader/Google+/Google Groups/Google Maps/Google Mashed Potatoes Home Delivery client for Mac and iOS, though it lacks ludicrous-res graphics for the triple-Retina iPhone 5 that will ship on August 7th, which will be a show-stopper for some. As expected, the Android version is less polished and lacks a few features, but it’s more open by a good 15°, so it’s winning.

# Posted by Ölbaum, early evening | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

android, gmail, google, ios, mac, rumour, sparrow

(At the time of this writing, Incredibox had been 9gagged.)

# Posted by Ölbaum, lunch time | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Beat, Incredibox, Music, Sample, À la volette