Atom posts

Filed under: OS Updates, Hardware, Apple

Atom support back in Mac OS X, Hackintosh netbooks not dead after all

by Jay Hathaway Nov 5th 2009

We recently reported some bad news for Hackintosh enthusiasts: Apple's upcoming OS update, OS X 10.6.2, had removed support for Intel Atom processors. None of Apple's hardware uses Atom, but some of the most popular netbooks do, so that news affected a big chunk of the unauthorized OS X installs out there. With the latest developer build of 10.6.2, though, Apple seems to have flip-flopped and reintroduced Atom support.

A couple of possible explanations come to mind: removing Atom support could have been a bug, or it could have been an intentional, yet temporary, measure. On the other hand, maybe flipping the Atom switch back on is temporary. We really don't know, because Apple hasn't commented. The company is notorious for taking measures to keep its OS running exclusive on Macintosh hardware, so this could still go either way. For now, though, enjoy having a netbook with the very latest build of OS X

[via Engadget]

Tags: apple, atom, hackintosh, intel atom, IntelAtom, netbook, os x 10.6.2, OsX10.6.2

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, E-mail

Scott's GMail Alert is a kick-ass GMail, Google Calendar, and RSS notifier

by Lee Mathews Oct 13th 2009

Plenty of apps will give you a simple tap on the shoulder when new mail arrives arrives in your GMail inbox. There's GMail Assistant, GMail Notifier, GMail Notifier Plus, and of course Google offers their own app.

Today's entrant into the battle for GMail notification supremacy -- Scott's Gmail Alert -- has a lot going for it. Way more than just the fact that it doesn't use the word notifier in its name.

SGA can check up to five different GMail accounts including those in your Google Apps domains. Set custom color for your accounts and create as many as ten special alerts to make sure emails from VIPs stand out. Font settings can also be customized, and Aero Glass is supported on Windows 7 and Vista.

Tags: alert, alerter, atom, gmail, google-calendar, notifier, rss, scoots-gmail-alert

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Web services

Combine multiple feeds into one with FeedMingle

by Jay Hathaway Jun 8th 2009

I normally use Yahoo! Pipes to combine multiple feeds into one, but that's like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer compared to FeedMingle. It's a single-use site that does nothing but combine feeds and spit out the results in RSS, Atom, JSON or HTML widget flavors.

FeedMingle will autodetect feeds if you're lazy like me and just feel like putting in the main URL of a site. It doesn't matter whether you input the Atom or RSS URL anyway, because you have your choice of output formats. The feeds that FeedMingle creates work fine in a few readers I tested, but I'd like to see them distinguish which source feed each item came from.

Tags: atom, feed, feedmingle, JSON, rss

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Web services, Social Software

You too can be a nosy neighbor with iStalkr

by Chris Gilmer Apr 7th 2007

Who's up for a little stalking? Its ok, no Britney Spears stalking, just some RSS and ATOM feed stalking. iStalkr is out of beta and ready for users to create a world of spying and nosiness.

iStalkr is a web application that creates a "lifestream" that will track RSS and ATOM feeds from a variety of services that you might use throughout the day including Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Reader and Twitter over a time line. From that point, you can choose to paste a time line of data into a website or blog to let people know what you are up to, or monitor other people's timelines to see what they have been up to.

It's a pretty cool application, but really doesn't serve any other purpose.. Sure its great to see how many times someone twitters, when they check out their news feeds, and how many times they Digg something throughout the day, but it's just another fluffy Web 2.0 gadget.

[via Profy]

Tags: atom, delicious, digg, flickr, google, istalkr, lifestream, rss, stalking, timeline, web 2, Web2

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, Google, Freeware

Google Reader offers Trends analysis page

by Jason Clarke Jan 4th 2007

If you've made the switch to Google Reader, you might be interested to learn that Google has released a page in your account called Trends that will give you some interesting statistics about the pages you read, including the total number of feeds you are currently subscribed to, the number of posts you've read in the past 30 days, the number of posts you've starred or shared, the time of day and day of week that you read posts, and some interesting analysis of your reading trends and subscription trends.

For me, this page is a godsend. It gives me the ability to see which of my subscriptions are dormant, allowing me to feel free to unsubscribe from them - it even offers a handy unsubscribe button next to each subscription listed. The opposite is also true; I can see which feeds update most often, and decide whether I get enough value from reading those feeds to staying subscribed to them.

More details about Google Reader Trends can be found at the official Google Reader Blog. Unfortunately, I've yet to be able to deduce what the % Read statistic means; my initial thought was that it describes how many of the posts in a given feed I've actually read, but that doesn't make sense when I go back and look at my actual feeds. Maybe someone can comment here with the actual meaning of that column.

Tags: Atom, Feed Reading, feed statistics, FeedReading, FeedStatistics, Google Reader, Google Reader Trends, GoogleReader, GoogleReaderTrends, RSS

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Web services

Feed Crier: IM Notifications for feed updates

by Jordan Running Aug 21st 2006

Feed Crier is a new service from Adam Kalsey that will send you an IM notification whenever RSS or Atom feeds you're subscribed to are updated. This sort of thing has been done before, of course, but Feed Crier has some features and a little polish that we haven't seen before. It only works with AIM (only temporarily, Kalsey assures us), but signing up is fast and easy. There's no form to fill out--you just send an IM to feedcrier on AIM with the keyword subscribe and the URL of the feed you want to subscribe to, and you're up and ready to go. The free version of Feed Crier lets you subscribe to up to three feeds, but paying a $4 monthly fee gives you unlimited feeds, feed summaries, a web interface for managing your feeds, and offline delivery for when you're, well, not online.

[Via TechCrunch]

Tags: aim, atom, blogs, feed crier, FeedCrier, feeds, im, rss

Filed under: Web services, Open Source

Feed2JS: Embed any feed in your web site

by Jordan Running Jul 31st 2006

Feed2JS is a handy service that will let you embed any RSS or Atom feed in your web site or blog. All you have to do is paste in the URL of a feed and Feed2JS will give you a snippet of JavaScript that will display the feed on your page. Feed2JS is pretty configurable, letting you choose how many items to display, whether it will show full items or just headlines, whether or not to strip HTML from items, what time zone offset to use if displaying dates, and more. And if your CSS skills aren't up to snuff, Feed2JS also has quite a few pre-defined styles for prettying it up.

Tags: atom, feed, feed2js, feeds, javascript, rss

Filed under: Fun, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, How-Tos

Viewing Google Reader feeds in 3 ways

by Victor Agreda, Jr. May 9th 2006

The Official Google Reader Blog has a quick how-to for setting up three different ways to view your Google Reader feeds. Granted, this is rather simplistic for anyone who uses the specific tools they mention- those tools being OS X's feeds screensaver, Firefox's Live Bookmarks, and grabbing podcasts in iTunes. Still, most of the world has yet to truly understand the whole "feed reading" thing, so if your granny is still scratching her head in front of that shiny new iMac, this might be a good little intro for her...

Tags: atom, firefox, reader, screensaver

Filed under: Web services

FeedRinse: Filter the cruft out of your RSS feeds

by Jordan Running Mar 24th 2006

Like Download Squad but sick of hearing about Vista? Or maybe those Time Wasters are really wasting too much of your time? Try Feed Rinse. It's a service that looks at your RSS feeds (OPML import included) and filters out posts based on keywords, author, tags, URLs, or even profanity. Feed Rinse scrubs the feeds and then republishes them so you can still read them in your feed reader of choice.

Unfortunately, Feed Rinse's free service is.. limited. You can only filter three feeds in the Free version and there's no profanity filter. The next step up is "Plus," which isn't even available yet but will cost $5 a month for 20 feeds, and Premium, which supports up to 300 feeds, will cost $8/mo. That pricing structure seems a little wacky to me, but it looks like a useful service so hopefully they'll find their niche.

[Via Lifehacker]

Tags: atom, censor, Feed Rinse, FeedRinse, feeds, filter, rss

Filed under: Web services, Google

Sharing feed items with Google Reader

by Jordan Running Mar 22nd 2006

Development on the somewhat unpopular Google Reader doesn't seem to go at a furious pace, but every couple months they drop a new feature into it and usually it's at least marginally cool. Yesterday was such an event, and the feature they've added lets you share selected items from the feeds you read with your friends. Now each label in Google Reader has a "make public" option, and when you enable it two links are generated: One that your friends can click on to subscribe to those items in Reader, and one for an Atom feed that they can use in any feed reader. It also works for starred items. You can also do the same for your starred items. On top of that, there's also a new "clip" feature similiar to yesterday's Feedo Style that lets you add a live list of your shared items to any web page by pasting a snippet of code on your site. You can customize the box's title, color scheme (you have eight predefined choices), and number of items shown.

Tags: aggregator, atom, feed, feeds, friends, google, reader, rss, share, sharing, social

Filed under: Web services, Google

Google Reader gets an update

by Jordan Running Feb 1st 2006

Just when I was beginning to think of Google Reader as cobweb-ware, the Reader team has announced a nice update to the web-based newsreader. It's nothing earth-shattering, but they have made labels much easier to use with a new drop-down menu as well as a keyboard shortcut that makes adding labels lightnight-fast for us keyboard junkies. There are also some miscellaneous features and additions like better error messages and improved sorting and filtering. It's still not as robust as some web-based services but every improvement helps.

Tags: aggregator, atom, google, reader, rss

Filed under: Web services, Commercial

FeedLounge web-based feed reader goes live

by Jordan Running Jan 26th 2006

I've had an invitation to FeedLounge in my Inbox since July, and now I'm never going to get to use it. FeedLounge is yet another web-based feed reader service, but has gotten pretty stellar reviews, and has just opened up to the public. It has the requisite AJAXy interface ("you may quickly forget that you’re using a web application"), a full set of keyboard shortcuts, three different views (Outlook-style, three-column, or river of news), color-coded tagging and flagging, OPML import and export, 401 authentication, and more. One thing you'll find in FeedLounge that you won't in most other services, though, is a price tag: FeedLounge costs $5/month or $50/year. You can try a three-hour demo, but they only let 50 people on at a time, and the waiting list is pretty long.

Tags: aggregator, ajax, atom, feed reader, feedlounge, feeds, rss, rss reader, web 2.0

Filed under: Blogging, Web services, Open Source

Blox0r: AJAXy Outlooky RSS reader

by Jordan Running Jan 16th 2006

TV Squad guy Keith McDuffee got it right when he said "silly name, neat interface" telling us about Blox0r, which advertises itself as "The best online aggregator ever!" Its an AJAXy feed reader that uses a classic Outlook three-pane interface. On the left is a list of feeds you're subscribed to, a la Bloglines, and on the right are two panes, one for headlines and one to show the stories you click on. I like the default mode because it takes you to the actual web site so you can read comments and so on, but it also has a Preview Summary mode which will show summaries of all of the recent stories in a particular feed. It has most of the features you expect from a web-based feed reader and a few more, so despite the name it's worth a look if you're in the market for a feed reader. What's more, it's open source, so you can download it, tweak the code, and run your own aggregator service if you want.

Tags: aggregator, atom, blox0r, bloxor, feeds, reader, rss

Filed under: Windows, Blogging, E-mail, Microsoft

Outlook 12 to include RSS reader

by Jordan Running Jan 5th 2006

In the not especially surprising news department, Redmondmag.com is reporting that Microsoft is planning to include an RSS aggregator in Outlook 12, to be released with Vista in the second half of this year. This is bad news for the likes of NewsGator who sell plugins that give Outlook feed capability. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft will reconcile the inclusion of feed support in both Outlook and Internet Explorer.

Tags: atom, feed reader, feeds, internet explorer, microsoft, newsgator, outlook, rss, vista, windows

Filed under: Web services

The Atomibulator: Atom feeds for feedless sites

by Jordan Running Jan 3rd 2006

RSS and Atom feeds have become ubiquitous to the point that we've begun to take them for granted, but there are still some sites stuck in the stone age. For those sites there's Atomibulator, a service that watches feed-less web sites and provides an Atom feed that's updated whenever they are. It's a bit crufty at this point--adding a feed to the service requires editing a Wikipedia page--but potentially very useful still.

Tags: aggregator, atom, atomibulator, feeds, rss, syndication

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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