After Kscope 13 and a week of staycation, I suppose I should get back to blogging. Not really much on my mind lately, so I figured a collection of links would do.
You’ve been quiet lately too. Real comments have been scarce since I moved away from Disqus. I hope those aren’t related. Say hi or something.
The Post-Reader World
Now that Google Reader is gone, I’ve settled into NewsBlur as my replacement. NewsBlur’s feature set is pretty close to what I used Reader to do, and so far, I’ve been happy with it. The mobile apps are good, and I found an IFTTT recipe to transfer shared items to Evernote, something I definitely missed.
NewsBlur has a shared item feed, a blurblog, which functions exactly like the old Reader Shared Items feed did.
I did briefly test FeedBin, but found it a bit slow. Its unread counts were always different than Reader’s and NewsBlur’s too, which was odd. To its credit, FeedBin has great serious third-party app support from Press and Reeder, but I’m not in love with how they handle credentials right now. I might go back and give it another shot at some point.
What are you using to fill gaping void Reader left?
More Hollywood UI
Some topics seem to rotate through the interest cycle for odd reasons. Since I mentioned file interfaces, I’ve read another piece on the Verge about what designers can learn from sci-fi interfaces and found a compendium of various film and TV interfaces (h/t the Verge), the IMDB of FUI, fictional user interfaces.
Enjoy.
Nitrous IO
A while back, I speculated that Google would soon deploy a cloud-based IDE for its myriad of developers. Turns out there’s a startup doing this already, Nitrous.IO (h/t O’Reilly Radar). Using Nitrous.IO, you can spin up Python, Ruby, Rails, Node.js, Go, and Django environments in less than a minute, according to the site.
This fully cloud-hosted solution, including the IDE, makes that Chromebook you got from IO a lot more useful to do real work, something Anthony (@anthonyslai) has been experimenting with since he got his Chromebook Pixel. Anthony put Ubuntu on his Pixel, but presumably, Nitrous.IO would make Chrome OS a lot more valuable by providing an IDE.
FWIW I checked out Anthony’s Pixel recently. The display is amazing, although at its full resolution, 2560 x 1700 at 239 PPI, I can’t imagine how he gets through a day without a splitting headache.
That’s it for now. Anything on your mind? Find the comments.
