NetNewsWire and Animated Sorting

2008-04-15T10:52:00.001Z

Ever since NetNewsWire became gratis on 2008-January-09, I've been using it as one of my desktop feed readers. I just noticed something very cool. First, go to the View menu, choose Sort Subscriptions By, and make sure Animate Sorting is checked. Then change your Subscriptions sort order and watch your subscribed feeds float up and over and around each other until they settle into their new position. This is so much fun that I've been clicking the Refresh All button way more than I used to!

In my preferences, I've set my feed subscriptions to refresh "Manually only." I chose "Manually only" because I only wanted to look at feeds about once a day and then do the refresh at that one time each day (different time on different days, but only once a day). A positive side effect of refreshing manually is that I get to watch the animation. A negative side effect is that I'm refreshing about ten times a day now because it's so much fun to watch the animation. So beware of a possible new addiction/time waster.

While playing around with this, I discovered the sort by Last Update option, which is now my preferred sort. I wish my email client let me sort my incoming mailboxes by Last Update. Actually, I wish that NetNewsWire were an IMAP client as well as a feed client! But for now I'm quite satisfied using it as a feed reader and as one of my web browsers. It's a pretty good web browser too.

Note: NetNewsWire 3.1.5 was released today, 2008-April-15.

IUseThis: Social Networking for Nerds

2007-11-12T16:40:00.002Z

I pay a lot of attention to software as you can tell by looking at the sidebar on the Deflexion.com home page, where I list tools and services that I use or that I'm considering using. I recently started using osx.iusethis.com to track the Mac OS X software that I use. It's an easy way to find out about updates, to learn about tips & problems from other users, and to learn about other software that I might like. Lots of people blog about the OS X software that they use and I often bookmark such posts in my del.icio.us bookmarks with the tag OSX, but it's overwhelming to go through these posts and decide what software I might actually want to try. IUseThis is a fun way to browse through software lists and quickly get a sense of what software might be useful to me. To me, IUseThis is an example of social networking for nerds. If you're a nerd like me and wondering what all the excitement about social networking is about, I recommend that you try IUseThis or some other object-centric social network service.

To learn about social networking, see:

Social network service at Wikipedia.org
Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison

To learn about the distinction between object-centric social networks and ego-centric social networks, see:

Social Network Transitions by Fred Stutzman

I'm mainly interested in using object-centric social networks, such as IUseThis and social bookmarking services, and my guess is that this is also the case for my fellow nerds.