Friday, March 31, 2006
Gritwire get's 'Crunched
Thanks to Frank Gruber for his review of Gritwire in his TechCrunch post, The State of Online Feed Readers. I spoke with Frank earlier this week, running through the various features offered by Gritwire. He didn't mention where the post would land, just that it wasn't going to be on his Somewhat Frank blog.
As happens with a TechCrunch mention, there's been a flurry of signups and postings. I really appreciated this post from a new Gritwire user.
As happens with a TechCrunch mention, there's been a flurry of signups and postings. I really appreciated this post from a new Gritwire user.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
PC Today profiles Gritwire
We received a product review in the May 2006 edition of PC Today. The first page of the article is available here: Gritwire Free Web-based RSS & Podcasts
One interesting piece of misinformation is that it suggests we've been online for only six weeks?? A pre-alpha-version of Gritwire was up June '04, which was followed quickly in July with a slightly-less-pre-alpha-version of Gritwire, and the WebTop version of Gritwire was launched leading up to our sponsorship of the Syndicate Conference in December.
Outside of that erroneous detail the writeup is primarily a functional description of our features. We're hoping to fix a couple of mentioned "shortcomings" including reintroducing a feed directory and improving access to instructions...although our real goal is to be easy enough to use that instructions are unnecessary. As alway, if you DO have questions or ideas, you can contact me via this blog, email, or phone.
One interesting piece of misinformation is that it suggests we've been online for only six weeks?? A pre-alpha-version of Gritwire was up June '04, which was followed quickly in July with a slightly-less-pre-alpha-version of Gritwire, and the WebTop version of Gritwire was launched leading up to our sponsorship of the Syndicate Conference in December.
Outside of that erroneous detail the writeup is primarily a functional description of our features. We're hoping to fix a couple of mentioned "shortcomings" including reintroducing a feed directory and improving access to instructions...although our real goal is to be easy enough to use that instructions are unnecessary. As alway, if you DO have questions or ideas, you can contact me via this blog, email, or phone.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Tip: Double-clicking
Thought I'd throw up a couple tips today for power users.
- A quick way to maximize a widget or return a maximized widget to its standard size is to double click the header bar.
- Double click on any story in the SpeedFeed Reader to pop open a new browser window with the full story.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Flexible Folder, SpeedFeed, and Quicklink Ordering
Continuing through the list...
New Feature: Folder and SpeedFeed Ordering
This feature was built into both the SpeedFeed reader and the QuickLinks widget. One thing people had asked us for on several occassions was the ability to order their folders, feeds, and quicklinks. That is now possible just by dragging and dropping on the main interface.
At the moment there's one small bug, but there's a workaround. If you try to drag something to the top of the list, it'll give you an "x" signaling it's not a place you're allowed to drop the item. However, if you just drop it in the second place down, you can then drag the top item below it. Yes, it's not perfect, but it gets the job done.
New Feature: Folder and SpeedFeed Ordering
This feature was built into both the SpeedFeed reader and the QuickLinks widget. One thing people had asked us for on several occassions was the ability to order their folders, feeds, and quicklinks. That is now possible just by dragging and dropping on the main interface.
At the moment there's one small bug, but there's a workaround. If you try to drag something to the top of the list, it'll give you an "x" signaling it's not a place you're allowed to drop the item. However, if you just drop it in the second place down, you can then drag the top item below it. Yes, it's not perfect, but it gets the job done.
Friday, March 17, 2006
Rolling Recommendations
Apologies on the continuing weather issue. We're debating the merits of two possible solutions and still haven't made much headway on actually implementing either of them...
New Feature: Gritwire Recommends...
If you've seen the WebTop, you've seen our "Gritwire Recommends..." folders. There are recommended SpeedFeeds and recommended QuickLinks seen both when you first get to the site and after you have logged in. There were three reasons we added these.
New Feature: Gritwire Recommends...
If you've seen the WebTop, you've seen our "Gritwire Recommends..." folders. There are recommended SpeedFeeds and recommended QuickLinks seen both when you first get to the site and after you have logged in. There were three reasons we added these.
- We wanted to show some of our wares to those of you who have not yet signed up. However, it really didn't make any sense to show you empty SpeedFeed Reader and QuickLinks widgets. Recommendations give you something to play with to get the flavor of what we're up to.
- There are still a lot of people who don't understand what this whole syndicated content thing is about. RSS, what? Podcasts, what? By giving some starter info we're hoping that those peole will find the site useful even without understand that it can be customized.
- Lastly, there are more random and interesting sources of information out there than you or I or any one person knows. We'd like to use the recommends feature to keep you up to date on what's fresh.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
First Impressions
Some of the great user experience and design minds of our time have made a point of nailing the first impression. I recently read the following,
"Another aspect of the Mac OS x UI that I think has been tremendously infuenced by [Steve ] Jobs is the setup and first-run experience. I think Jobs is keenly aware of the importance of first impressions...I think Jobs looks at the first-run experience and thinks, it may only be one-thousandth of a user ’s overall experience with the machine,but it ’s the most important one-thousandth, because it ’s the first one-thousandth, and it sets their expectations and initial impression." -John Gruber
A complaint we had received was that users didn't know what to do when they first got to Gritwire. Today we changed our login/signup widget to be center stage, large font, and hopefully self-explanatory for whatever option you might be hoping to select: login, signup, or learn more.
New Feature: Anonymous Access
Another addition in this version is the ability to play around with the widgets in the background without requiring a signup first. We hope this anonymous access also helps make a good first impression by showing a potential user some of the tools they'll have in their new web toolbox.
As always, any thoughts or suggestions are welcome. Please especially think about your first impressions when looking at Gritwire. Also, how does or doesn't that match your continued experience?
"Another aspect of the Mac OS x UI that I think has been tremendously infuenced by [Steve ] Jobs is the setup and first-run experience. I think Jobs is keenly aware of the importance of first impressions...I think Jobs looks at the first-run experience and thinks, it may only be one-thousandth of a user ’s overall experience with the machine,but it ’s the most important one-thousandth, because it ’s the first one-thousandth, and it sets their expectations and initial impression." -John Gruber
A complaint we had received was that users didn't know what to do when they first got to Gritwire. Today we changed our login/signup widget to be center stage, large font, and hopefully self-explanatory for whatever option you might be hoping to select: login, signup, or learn more.
New Feature: Anonymous Access
Another addition in this version is the ability to play around with the widgets in the background without requiring a signup first. We hope this anonymous access also helps make a good first impression by showing a potential user some of the tools they'll have in their new web toolbox.
As always, any thoughts or suggestions are welcome. Please especially think about your first impressions when looking at Gritwire. Also, how does or doesn't that match your continued experience?
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Site Update
We've made some changes to the Gritwire WebTop. After a quiet rollout we've been working away at fixing bugs and smoothing out rough spots. I'll go into more detail about the updates in future posts, but here's a quick list:
- Anonymous access
- Recommended SpeedFeeds
- Recommended Quicklinks
- Quicklinks folders
- Folder, Quicklink and SpeedFeed ordering
- SpeedFeed and individual article ratings
- Videocast support
- Discussion messaging
- Weather
Something strange seems to have happened to the weather widget today. We've been able to let the widget directly pull the weather from Yahoo! with no problems for the last couple months. Today the widget can't access it anymore. Our best guess is that Yahoo! removed what's called a cross domain file that allows remote flash files to access content on their site, but we're not sure that's what it is. We can fix it though, and we will do as soon as we can.
As I said, more to come describing these new features.
