Linked List: July 15, 2005

Friday, 15 July 2005

NetNewsWire to Support Atom 1.0 in Next Release ★

Brent Simmons:

A quick look at the current draft tells me there haven’t been any major upheavals since 0.3—it looks similar, and the changes I noticed are quite welcome. (The Atom Text Construct is simpler, I’m pleased to see.)

An Atom 1.0 feed would work reasonably well in the current version of NetNewsWire—except that the namespace URL has changed from http://purl.org/atom/ns# to http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom, which prevents it from working at all. (This isn’t a complaint, by the way—it’s correct that the namespace URL changed.)

Considering that NetNewsWire is the most popular desktop feedreader for any platform, this is good news for Atom. It’s also good to hear that the changes from Atom 0.3, which is fairly widely deployed already, are minimal.

Podcast Recording Tips for Audio Hijack Pro ★

Nice page of tips from Rogue Amoeba for using Audio Hijack Pro to record podcasts, including how to record audio chats from apps such as iChat and Skype.

Django ★

High-level web app framework for Python, written by Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison. It just debuted today, and I can’t say I know enough Python to really judge how good it is, but the web site for the project itself is outstanding — and, of course, it’s powered by Django. It’s nice to see something debut with a decent amount of documentation. (Via Andy Baio.)

Optimus Keyboard ★

Cool design concept for a keyboard where each keycap is a tiny LCD display, which allows for context-sensitive key labels, including icons. But I have no idea how they expect touch-typists to use that Return key. (Via Kottke.)

Shiira 1.1 ★

Open source browser based on Web Kit. New update brings back support for Mac OS X 10.3. Rendering-wise, it’s exactly like Safari, but the browser UI is quite different. Shiira’s nicest feature is Tab Exposé — a clever way to view the contents of all tabs in a single window at once.

RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, Compared ★

Atom 1.0 is about to ship. Tim Bray has put together a helpful page comparing it with RSS 2.0. It’s unclear to me whether Atom is going to be able to gain any traction at this point; I do think it’s a little better specified than RSS 2.0 (e.g. I like the way you can use type='xhtml' or type='text' attributes to specify how your content is formatted), but I don’t think it’s nearly enough better than RSS to compensate for the enormous popularity RSS is achieving.

Backpack Dashboard Widget ★

Chipt Productions has released a widget for hooking up with 37signals’s Backpack. Hooray for web apps that provide APIs. A nice bit of desktop integration: the widget lets you use Growl for displaying reminder notifications. Getting a reminder in front of your face is a hard task for a purely web-based app.

DragThing 5.6.1 ★

Minor bug-fix update to James Thompson’s excellent palette/dock utility.