Blue Sky On Mars

I love cats as much as the next guy, but a new cat picture posted on a blog is not a good reason to interrupt my current train of thought. Right now, I’m writing this little article. If a box popped up saying “3 new blog postings” or “SomeSite: Here’s my cat”, that would derail this sentence as I’m writing it and take a few seconds to shift back and forth between the trains of thought.

Most feed reading programs have taken many cues from email programs, and that includes some kind of popup that shows you that new items have arrived. Is it really that important to see the items right now? Unnecessary distractions can weigh down your productivity.

I prefer to conciously decide “I’m going to take a look and see what’s going on in the world”, and then actively open up my news program. I don’t have popup notification on my mail program, because even email can wait a little while.

For this reason, Zesty News doesn’t have a new item notification feature yet. It just hasn’t been a priority for me. if people start asking, I’ll certainly add a notification feature.

I’d be curious to hear from others who do use the popup notification feature from other newsreaders.

Blazing Things

Calling an “alpha” feature complete is kind of funny. In my book, an “alpha” release is one that is missing some features that are planned for the final release. A “beta” release has all of the planned features, but is not fully tested.

At this point, I have put together all of the features planned for Zesty News 1.0 alpha. So, the alpha is feature complete… but Zesty News 1.0 final is not.

Last week, I put on my product manager hat and decided that I would let me do a little feature creep. I added automatic update detection and the ability for the user to download and install a patch file for most updates. I have not yet done size optimization on the Zesty News releases, so the builds are pretty large. While going through the testing cycle, I’d really rather not force people to re-download a few megs when a couple hundred K will suffice. Beyond the download size, though, this update system lets the user know what is new and lets them download and install with a single click. That’s a lot more convenient than downloading and running the installer.

Thus starts cleanup work: fixing known issues and niggles and making the interface look better.

Blazing Things

There will certainly be folks that disagree with me on this one, but I think that feed reading belongs in the browser. Most of the feed readers that I’ve seen have a Windows or Mac user interface and include a web browser in a portion of the window. A few, including Zesty News, have the primary user interface show up directly in the user’s web browser.

At least at this point, feed reading is largely about resources that are on the web. The items in most feeds point back to pages on the web. This is why feed readers with a Windows interface embed Internet Explorer in their Window: so that you can get the details on an item without leaving their interface.

Once a web browser appears in a feed reader’s interface, it quickly becomes apparent that you need at least some of the browser’s features: back, forward, stop and reload buttons. You might also want to get ahold of the browser’s bookmarks, so that the user has access to those and can add bookmarks to things they like. You’ll also need to put in the keyboard shortcuts that people are used to. Maybe you’ll make the browsing experience better by adding tabbed browsing.

But, what happens if the user’s browser is Firefox and not Internet Explorer? Those users already have tabbed browsing, so that’s not really an added bonus. If the feed reader doesn’t specifically support it, adding a bookmark would add it to IE rather than Firefox. Firefox also has many great extensions that the user will miss out on if they’re forced to use IE for browsing in their feed reader.

What this boils down to is that the author of the feed reader will have to duplicate many features from the web browser’s interface, and even then will likely be providing a suboptimal experience to those who browse with something other than Internet Explorer on Windows and Safari on the Mac.

The argument in favor of using a “native” interface rather than a web browser-based interface is that you can provide a “richer” experience. Data can be updated instantly on the screen without redrawing everything. You can have fancy, animated controls. You can have keyboard shortcuts for everything.

Two fairly recent phenomena make the case in favor of a browser-based feed reader: Firefox and the ability to provide more interactivity in modern browsers. Firefox has rapidly pulled market share away from IE. By some estimates, more than 10% of internet users now use Firefox. For those people, an embedded IE will be less than ideal.

More importantly, since Gmail’s introduction a year ago, it became apparent that browser-based interfaces can be quick, useful and even include keyboard shortcuts. Web browsers also include a very powerful layout engine that allows for all kinds of experimentation in presentation.

For me, building the interface for Zesty News in the web browser also made it easier for me to make Zesty News run on both Macs and PCs. The real driver of my choice to use the browser as the interface is that I can provide as rich an experience as needed while letting the user stick with the web browser that they already know.

Blazing Things

FYI for anyone who is already subscribed to my RSS feed here: there is no need for you to subscribe at Blazing Things. My posts to Blazing Things will also be posted here. The Blazing Things site will have the “official” word of Blazing Things, whereas Blue Sky On Mars will continue to be my place for personal commentary and technical discussion.

Blazing Things

I figured that I’d start my articles about Zesty News off with a light, uncontroversial topic: where did the name come from?

The Zesty News name actually came to mind when the original idea did in mid-2003. I liked the sound of it, and it even has a nice, although generally food-related, definition: “marked by spirited enjoyment”. That’s the way keeping up with the goings on in the world should be.

So, you’d think that the story would end there. Unfortunately for me, it didn’t end there. When I started this new company, I was having a rough time coming up with a business name that had a .com address available. Anyone starting a business today will know what I’m talking about. It seems that almost every combination of words has been taken.

I ran through many whois queries and tried a number of Nameboy combinations. Nothing was striking me, until I finally hit upon Blazing Things. On January 1st, 2005, I registered blazingthings.com. It made sense to me at the time to have a tight branding connection between the product and the company. So, I registered blazingnews.com also, and that was the name that the software started out with.

Kirsten, the graphics designer I’m working with, was just getting going on logo concepts when POW! In March, Go Daddy introduced a service called News Blazer. Blazing News and News Blazer were just too close for comfort. Hence the decision to bring back the Zesty News name.

In fact, the biggest reason that I announced the Zesty News software before I had the alpha test ready to ship was to get the name out there. I would have thought that Blazing News was a safe name until News Blazer came along.

Blazing Things