Categories
Development Stream

How I use Stream

I created Stream because I wanted a simple reverse chronological timeline of feeds. Dave Winer calls it a River of News. That’s also how Stream got its name. A stream is just a small version of a river – yes, that’s an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

Anywho, I just wanted to share how I use Stream. There is, of course, no wrong way to use it. Just use it your way.

When I announced Stream 1.0 was shipping I mentioned it was a complement to your existing feed reader. That’s why I want to talk about how I use it.

I use Stream for feeds that only update a few times a day. I don’t use it for feeds, like say, the New York Times. It’s just too much to consume without the folder organization system of other feed readers.

When I decided I should trim out feeds that published many, many, articles a day I exported my feeds list as OPML, removed the busy feeds from Stream, manually removed the lightweight feeds from the OPML I’d exported, imported the trimmed OPML into Feedbin, connected Unread to my Feedbin account on iOS and connected it to NetNewsWire on the Mac.

Wow. That sounds like a lot of work, but it wasn’t. Now I have my very casual list of bloggers I love to read. It’s still 162 feeds, but most of those feeds post rarely and the ones that post most often, like Kottke and Daring Fireball, only post a few times a day. It makes using Stream a real joy.

If you’re curious about my feeds feel free to checkout my OPML file.

Categories
Apple

Apple FOMO

FOMO is what Apple depends on. We are all hypercritical about certain things. A lot of Apple podcasters are hypercritical about their hardware. They buy the latest greatest and say it’s the best evar! Then the new one ships and the one they have is complete crap. 😄

Meanwhile I’m using a 2015 MacBook Pro and it is perfectly fine. I have a 2019 MacBook Pro at work and quite frankly I don’t notice a difference.

Of course I’ll get a new computer at some point. It will happen when I can no longer upgrade the OS. That’s how I roll. And even then it may not be the current year model.

Categories
Development

Irrational Rob

I love writing software. I especially love writing my own software. When I’m doing my own thing the day zooms by. I’m energized afterward. Ready to get back to work on it.AHHHHHH!

I’ve been doing iOS work for quite a while now and have always wanted to do a native Mac app. Of course SwiftUI will allow me to do that fairly easily.

Here’s the thing. There is this super irrational me that wants to put apps on iOS, macOS, Windows, and possibly Linux. Maybe even Android, who knows. The first three targets for sure; iOS, macOS, and Windows. To that end I keep plugging away on my own C++ class libraries. Recently I started refactoring them. I love the way UIKit/AppKit are built, so I’ve modeled what I’ve done thus far after those Frameworks. It’s still very early days but I’m enjoying the process.

There is the irrational Rob. The one that wants to build his own class libraries so he can write one hunk of code in C++ that works on different platforms.

Recently I asked a friend for advice about how he’d implement a dictionary class. His answer was simple, and the proper one: “I wouldn’t. I’d use std::map because it’s a dictionary and I’d use std::vector because it’s an array.” Of course he’s correct! It’s completely irrational for me to do this stuff, yet, I’m still going to do it.

Why? Because I can and I want to.

Categories
Life

Perseverance

NASA: “This is the first image NASA’s Perseverance rover sent back after touching down on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. The view, from one of Perseverance’s Hazard Cameras, is partially obscured by a dust cover.”

I watched the stream until touchdown, about the last 10 minutes.

Thought I’d record it here.

Categories
Life Politics

Empathy

HuffPost: “I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.“

This article from 2017 captures my beliefs. Caring for our fellow man seems a natural thing to do. Why can’t everyone have a livable wage, a great free education, and the best health care in the world? These all seem totally doable in the United States of America.

If you had to work five jobs to get through university or suffer with broken bones and various injuries through your life why would you want that for others? Why wouldn’t you want your children to have it better?

We have big problems to solve. Let’s give the next generation a chance to do it.

Categories
Life

Our Winter Wonder Land

Categories
Cloud Life Social

On Parler and Amazon

AHHHHHH!It would appear Parler has the ACLU working to help them. Irony abounds!

The ACLUs assertion that Amazon “really owns the keys to the internet” is wrong.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, and many, many, companies have built their own data centers so they don’t have a dependency on a single point of failure.

I know services like AWS and Azure make it easy to fire up services, but they’re not a requirement. Anyone who says they are is plain wrong.

Is it expensive to manage your own data center? Yes, it is. Can you manage your own data center? Yes, you can.

There are plenty of stories about services moving from AWS, and other setups, to their own infrastructure. It’s going to be difficult, for sure, but it’s not insurmountable.

The Parler folks are going to have to suck it up and build their own data center or find someone that’ll host their platform. Maybe Newsmax or OANN will lend them some space. I guess Gab has already offered.

If you want to play with the big boys, you have to bring your A-game, and the chops to run a data center.

Categories
Business Life Politics

Not a First Amendment Issue

Deadline: “They made an attempt to not only kill the app, but to actually destroy the entire company. And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.”

Parler hitched its wagon to a vile President’s rhetoric and what they deem free speech. Which is their choice, as a company, to make.

On the flip side all the other companies they chose to depend on for their services are free to choose not to host their content.

If Parler wants to continue to exist they’re free to build their own data center, purchase their own server, and connect them to the web. Google, Apple, and Amazon cannot keep you off the web. It’s open.

But they don’t have to support the hate of your platform.

Oh, I almost forgot. The First Amendment to the Constitution only applies to the Government infringing on your right to free speech. It doesn’t apply to private companies.

Categories
Life Politics

Coup

I had to write this down so I’d never forget what happened today.

Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol today, durning the certification of the 2020 US Election.

Trump himself is responsible for the coup attempt. He held a rally in DC, riled his supporters up, and let them do their thing.

This is another dark mark on the United States of America.

On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will become President and Vice President of our country. They have a real mess to cleanup.

Categories
Development Indie iOS Life Mac Weblogging Windows

Focus, Rob

It’s Christmas morning, early. The house is quiet but my brain is going crazy with thoughts of projects I should work on. The thing is, I don’t need any additional projects to work on.

AHHHHHH! When I decided to build Stream it was because I wanted to do something small. I had originally started building a blog editor that would post to WordPress and Tumblr. The core of the app was being written in C++ so I could share that core between iOS, macOS, and Windows apps. It was going to be a lot of work. More work than I had the time to invest.

So, I did my little app: Stream. That took over two years to complete. I spent a lot of time on the guts of the app. Mainly around discovery of feeds and parsing those feeds. As a result I have a decent set of code for dealing with RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, OPML, and HTML. It was a real joy to finally ship.

The bottom line is this, I’m slow. Couple that with limited time to work on stuff and it takes forever to complete a project.

This morning my brain is spinning on the idea of that blogging app. As much as I’d like to do it, I really do love blogging, it’s not the project I really need to pour my efforts into.

The project I need to work on is going to be a many year effort. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for at least 15-years. The target OS has changed and morphed over those years but the app idea hasn’t, and I’m getting help from a longtime friend who just happens to be a really great developer.

Focus, Rob. Focus.