Month: August 2009

Thanks to Dave Crossland for pointing me to Dave Winer's view on the iphone as a developer platform and its problematic app store model.

The iPhone should have run the same software as the Macintosh. When I first heard about it, I misunderstood and thought I'd be able to write Frontier scripts that ran both on my desktop and the phone. I was a Blackberry user at the time, and I found the idea of a MacPhone truly inspiring. From there, it went downhill, and downhill and downhill. This platform was Apple's revenge on developers. Everything under their control. You couldn't even ship a product that Apple didn't approve of! Obviously that was going to be abused, and it has been, but finally it's become so ridiculous that it's obvious, even to Mike, that it can't work.

I've been through this loop many times, this is Mike's first. The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that's the Internet.

Steve Jobs is the anti-Internet. The Internet is utilitarian, it works, but it's ugly. Jobs's stuff is so beautiful that when taken to its logical conclusion, and he's almost there now, it's so dazzling, so beautiful that you fail to see that it is also useless.

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Interesting to see this in my email today. I'm now going to reconsider my rss reader choice after reading this…

You spoke and we listened: in response to customer demand, NewsGator's best-of-breed consumer RSS applications now work with Google Reader. Google Reader will become the online companion to and the synchronization platform for our award-winning RSS reader applications – FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.

In conjunction with this announcement, NewsGator is making changes to several of its consumer RSS Readers. NewsGator will continue to support all its individual end-user applications for enterprise customers. However, NewsGator will continue to develop and support only a sub-set of these applications for free consumer use. FeedDemon and NetNewsWire have new versions for consumers that we encourage you to download as soon as possible. NewsGator’s other individual end-user applications will not continue to be supported for free consumer users after August 31, 2009. Again, all of NewsGator’s individual end-user applications will continue to be supported for paying Enterprise customers.

As part of this transition, NewsGator Online users will need to migrate to Google Reader by August 31, 2009. In addition, NewsGator will no longer support the free versions of NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Go!, and NewsGator’s RSS features (Shared Clipping Feed, Blogroll, Ratings, Headlines, Browser Toolbar, and Desktop Notifier). NewsGator will also continue to support FeedDemon (for Windows) and NetNewsWire (for Mac and iPhone) for all customers – free or paid. If you have questions as to whether or not you qualify as a paying enterprise customer, please contact your account manager.

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