TweetDeck have updated their desktop version to version 0.31. There are a fair few improvements. The main one is updated alerts interface which looks much nicer (shiny glass-like semi transparent look) and is more customisable,  including the ability to only show alerts for certain columns.  You can also cycle through the new tweets in the alert box, similar the way Digsby’s alert box works.  You can also pick which quarter of the screen the notification box shows on and whether to see the full alert box or just the new items summary (see below).

It would be nice if you could muck with the opacity on the alerts, but no biggie.

Steven Hodson over on The Inquisitr has done a good rundown of TweeDeck’s features and what he does & doesn’t like.  He still isn’t going to use it for a few reasons, especially because of its lack of spam & keyword filtering and the inability to change the font sizes and a few other UI irritations.  I agree with his points, but these aren’t deal breakers for me.  For the way I use twitter, it’s still the best client.

However there is still one issue that really frustrates me, and I don’t know if it’s just a limitation of Adobe Air (the software TweetDeck runs on) or whether it’s just an oversight but it is really annoying that it doesn’t cache the user profile images.  Every time I scroll up & down the page it has to reload everyone’s profile picks from Twitter as they scroll into view.

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After writing my last post I remembered that I’d done up a send-to option for FeedDemon itself too.  It’s pretty simple just download this XML file and save it to the c:\Program Files\FeedDemon\Data\SendTo\ folder. Restart FeedDemon and you can then use the Send To option to clip an item to Evernote. Same as the Google Reader version, this will clip the whole page that the news item is from, not just the news feed item, and it will open up a page that will let you tag or move the clipped item.

Unfortunately at this point there’s no way to set the icon next to custom Send To items (that I’m aware of anyway)

While I’m not a big Google Reader user, preferring FeedDemon, the fact that FeedDemon now syncs with Reader is really handy when I’m not using my own computer because it keeps up to date with all my stuff.  This week, the Google Reader team announced a couple of new features (one of which was inspired by FeedDemon’s Panic Button) including the ability to send a news item to other services.

It comes with a list of pre-defined options such as Delicious, Digg & Facebook, but it also has the ability to add custom ones using the substitution tags provided

Because of this, we can set it up to clip stuff straight from Google Reader into an Evernote notebook.  Stealing from the Evernote Web Clipper bookmarklet, you can create a custom ’send-to’ destination like this:

1. Go to Google Reader and click on ‘Settings’ then ‘Send To’
2. Click on the ‘Create A Custom Link’ button
3. In the form that appears put ‘Evernote’ in the Name field, http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?title=${title}&url=${url} in the Url field and http://www.evernote.com/favicon.ico in the Icon Url field
4. Click ‘Save’

You’ll then have Evernote in your send to menu

This will automatically clip the whole page that the news item links to into Evernote, so even if the RSS feed that you’re reading only does partial feeds, this will grab the whole original article from the site, great if you want to read it later when you’re offline with your iPhone or PC/Mac Evernote client.  Once it’s clipped the page it takes you to a page where you can move the clipped item into a different Notebook & add some tags to it, but this is optional, the item is already stored in your default Evernote notebook

So there you go, a really easy way to grab anything from Google Reader & stick it into Evernote

Nick Bradbury has just released the latest beta version of his great RSS reader FeedDemon. With the new update comes a bunch of new items & so that means that my old localisation file is now out of date.

Since I got to play with a pre-release version (thanks Nick!) I had a chance to update the language file that comes with version 3 to replace Synchronize with Synchronise, Color with Colour and so on. So if you like your colourful language, you can grab the file here after downloading FeedDemon. To install the file either click on the link to the language file while browsing in FeedDemon, or download the file & copy it to C:Program FilesFeedDemonDatalang (Assuming you’ve installed FeedDemon there) and then double-click on the file.

One thing to note: in the Tools menu, the ‘Synchronization Options’ menu item uses the ‘z’ as the keyboard shortcut.  Because ‘Open FeedStation’ already uses the s, I’ve make the ‘Synchronisation Options’ use the ‘y’ as the shortcut letter.

Any mistakes or missed words please let me know! There is a topic on the NewsGator localisation forums for this language file too.

As Amit Agarwal pointed out in his (very detailed) post, the new FeedDemon is a great Twitter client, with a whole bunch of features to make using Twitter easier.

One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that FeedDemon’s newspaper layout is very customisable, I while I use the Surfer theme usually, I found that for Twitter feeds it was very annoying.  Showing the title is useless because the body of the post is the title, also, the large spacing around each post just used up a lot of space and meant I had to keep scrolling a lot to read the feed.  Also, the thumbnails view is pretty useless for a Twitter feed, seeing as it’s just full of people’s profile pictures

So I took the surfer style & I’ve customised it for a Twitter feed (download here).  FeedDemon is great in that it lets you set a custom newspaper style for particular feeds (Feed Properties -> Advanced).  The new Twitter style removes the thumbnails, removes the post title unless you’re in headlines only view and trims a lot of the extra whitespace.  Also I removed most of the action buttons as I don’t tend to send tweets or clip them (and if I want to, there are keyboard shortcuts) and unfortunately, which buttons show can’t be customised per feed.

Also, you can make your own custom buttons, so I added a Retweet button next to the new Reply button that sends you to Twitter with the retweet filled in ready to send.  This was surprisingly simple. The fact that Nick has used standard xslt to style FeedDemon rather than a proprietary format means that you can do pretty much whatever you want to, which is awesome!

So this is what it looks like now

If you want to give this a go, download this file and put it in the c:\Program Files\FeedDemon\Data\Styles folder & restart FeedDemon. Alternatively if you a reading this in FeedDemon you can just click on the download link & it will install it for you.  Then change the style for your Twitter feed(s) by right clicking on the feed then going to Feed Properties -> Advanced and pick Twitter from the list of Styles.

This is just a first idea, it probably needs work.  I’m debating moving the buttons under each tweet, but I’m not sure.  Also I’ve written this for the new FeedDemon 3 Beta.  It may well work for earlier versions, but I don’t know.  There’s a topic for this style in the Newsgator styles forum where you can leave comments / suggestions, or you can leave a comment here.

Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter here.

I gave in this week & installed iTunes, purely so I could purchase Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.  Of course as all Whedon fans who don’t live in the US now know, when you try & buy it you get this

Not. Happy Jan.

So now I’ve installed iTunes for no good reason at all!

I’m really not a fan of Apple’s client software, they tend to be bloated & they have a nasty habit of installing stuff that you weren’t expecting.  Unfortunately iTunes is no exception to this rule.  After installing it I went to my Windows Control Panel & I see this little icon there

MobileMe is Apple’s new sync application for the iPhone & iPod.  Now I don’t own an iPhone or an iPod (not through lack of *wanting* one) so I’ve got no use for this software.  I didn’t do the custom application when I installed iTunes like I normally do with new software because I was in a hurry, so there may have been an option to not install it there.  Either way, I never said to install this & I’ve got no use for it.

Removing it

Removing it is actually fairly simple.  Go to the Control Panel & click on Add/Remove programs (or whatever the Vista equivalent is).  You should see an entry for Apple Mobile Device Support. Click the remove button on that.  It may complain if you have Outlook open, but you can ignore that.

Once that’s finished (it took a surprisingly long time on my computer) refresh the control panel & the application will be gone.