BlogBridge Beta, part deux
I shoulda known…
There's cross-platform and then there's cross-platform.
A week later, about 20 testers later, we've done 2 more sub-releases (up to 0.5.2 now) to shake out various platformy problems. It's one thing to get it to run and another thing to get it to run right.
**Java WebStart:No picnic! ** While the promise is great, it doesn't live up to it. And to think that this has been a feature of Java for years and years (I think 4) and it still is full of problems. Still the notion that in one fell swoop we get intallation and on-the-fly updating is pretty powerful, so we'll just keep on struggling with it.
Threads aint Threads One area of Java where cross-platform is not so cross is in Threads. When it comes to the intricate timing, interaction, and detailed ordering of things, Threads on Windows can be totally different from Threads on Linux. The effect? A solid performer on one platform turns into a deadlock on the other. Fix the bug on the other and the one breaks. Fun.
Anyway, live and learn. I am still a believer! I think we can consider the first early beta up and running, so we are returning to our cave to work on features. As usual, if you want to be a beta tester, please send email to beta@blogbridge.com and we'll see if we can fit you in.
The Day After Tomorrow
Occassionally, I will have either an incredibly positive or negative reaction to a book, play or movie and I will be moved, who knows why, to write a bit about it here. Well, I just saw "The Day After Tomorrow" and it is totally lame. Yes the special effects are impressive, but the story, the dialog, the way the characters react, is so stilted, so ridiculous, that it annoyed me after 5 minutes in the movie.
And I am not objecting on scientific grounds. I don't know enough about the science to judge whether or not its realistic, semi-plausible, or totally nutty, but I am willing to suspend disbelief. And by the way, about the special effects: why do these folks standing around in sub zero temparatures in street not even look cold?
Anyway…
[GEEK] Ever get confused about logging.properties formats?
I know I do! Here's a very concise summary of the syntax that will jog your memory when it needs to be jogged!
[GEEK] Getting URL objects to time out
For some reason, it is not possible to get at the Socket object that the URL object uses for its network I/O. And so, on the face of it, you can't set or change the time-out time. However here are two, semi-kludge properties that Sun has provided us to overcome that deficiency:
System.setProperty("sun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout", "10000");
System.setProperty("sun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout", "10000");
BlogBridge beta is ON!
Here's the beta invite email that just went out… Wow, this is exciting! 🙂
"Thanks again for participating in this first beta of BlogBridge. A few comments before getting going:
This is an early beta. There are features missing and there are bugs. Please bear with us!
One of our expectations of you as beta testers is that you will give us feedback with enough detail that we can do something about it, and a chance to correct problems that you find.
We are very interested in your feedback on the feature set and usability of BlogBridge. You can have a lot of influence on the direction we take this application. Any and all suggestions are welcome.
Please send your questions and comments to the yahoo groups list so everyone can see the questions and answers. If you haven't joined the list yet, then please do so now as it will be the easiest way for us to keep in touch. You should have received an invitation to the list. If you have not, please advise us and we will put you on the list.
We will be putting up a wiki page where we can post standing comments, information, references, help, faq's etc.
Now a few items of introduction to the application (I wouldn't call this 'Help' yet!)
The buttons on the left are 'Channel Guides.' They represent collections of Channels (RSS Feeds) which have something in common. Right now, the names of the Channel Guides (e.g. 'Favorites') are purely cosmetic. There are no special semantics there (yet.) In the near future you will be able to add and delete Channel Guides and enable various kinds of 'Automatic Processing' on them.
The scrollable region in the middle are 'Channels' (which what BlogBridge calls RSS Feeds.) We didn't call them blogs or rss because the universe of RSS feeds is broader than just Blogs and feeds. We are designing an application for 'mere mortals.' You can add and delete Channels. You can drag and drop Channels to move them around, within and between Channel Guides.
BlogBridge comes with a set of default Channels in each Channel Guide. Feel free to change that.
The scrollable region on the right are 'Articles' (which is what BlogBridge calls RSS Items.) There are several controls on how Articles are displayed in the Preferences dialog box.
Ok, ready to go?
Here is the link to install and run BlogBridge: [blah blah blah] Please do not publish it to anyone. Instead if you know someone who would like to run the beta, please introduce them to us. If the url gets out we will just change it 🙂 We want to keep this beta to around 20 people until we have a first level sense of how things are and how much work it is to support you all.
After all, our primary mission is to build great software.
Thanks, and have fun!
Pito Salas and Aleksey Gureev"
Cross Platform, for real!
We are busy getting BlogBridge ready for beta (send email if you want to participate.) I hope we are only days away.
But in doing that, and updating the web site, I thought this might be of interest…
Java really works! Here are three screen shots of BlogBridge, on Linux, Windows XP and Mac OSX. We didn 't write any platform specific code, and yet, other than some minor font goop, it looks quite nice, IMHO.
Here's Linux:
Here's Mac OSX:
And here's Windows XP:
RSS not yet mainstream?
Another article in the New York Times about RSS:
"Called R.S.S. (the initials are variously said to stand for Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication and more obscure formulations), this increasingly popular online tool turns a morass of disparate information sources into an automatically generated and neatly organized index of the latest articles and postings"
You know we are not yet mainstream when the abbreviation periods are included in the name R.S.S. I mean when's the last time you saw H.T.M.L. or for that matter I.B.M?
What’s a beta, anyway?
BlogBridge is getting ready to go into a limited beta test. The purpose is to get some early feedback on the basic User Interface model and the overall product vision. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to email@blogbridge.com.
Doing a beta when you are operating a, shall we say, boutique software shop, is a different experience. The number of loose ends, bugs, procedural and process things that need to be nailed down are overwhelming.
The Web Site is being revised to reflect this new phase of work. The totally out in the open Functional Specification has been moved to a private area, a Wiki in fact. The thinking is that now that things are getting more real, and my hack is turning into a real product, it makes you think about where things might lead.
I've often said, and this experience seems to confirm it, that the degree of openness on a project seems to need to vary with the phase one is in.
In the very early, very formative stages of a product, being very open about future ideas and plans can only help. I believe that 'ideas are cheap' (pretty cheap, anyway) and that the value you get from sharing them with others generally outweighs whatever drawbacks it might have.
However, as you become ready to launch, being in stealth has it's advantages. For one thing you haven't settled on a strategy and you want to keep options open.
At this point my guestimate is that we are within a week of opening up the beta to about 10 people to start, and plan to ramp that up over the next months, while constantly adding features and removing bugs.
BlogBridge beta update
The beta test is almost ready to go. The plan is that it will start very small, with only a few users, and then based on feedback and results we will expand it as we release revisions and updates. If you are interested in joining up, send me email at beta@blogbridge.com.
Pop!Tech Ticket!
Pop!Tech is one of my all time favorite conferences. So favorite that I bought a ticket for this year's event way in advance. I have hit an insurmountable schedule problem and so I have to miss it this year. So, I have a ticket that I can't use, they won't refund (the X*&!@(#&!@#'s) but I can transfer. And it is substantially cheaper than what they are charging now because of when I bought it. If you are interested please contact me directly by email.