NewsFire: An Extraordinary Example of Extraordinary UI Design

When I first tried NewsFire I was literally stunned and amazed at the quality of the application. There aren’t very many third party applications that I use mainly because I tend to find Apple’s solutions more practical and suitable for me. For me to use a third party application it has to be beautiful and simplistic yet powerful and versatile and NewsFire meets and surpasses my requirement. David Watanabe, creator of NewsFire has successfully designed a “deliberately minimal interface” which strongly puts your news on “center stage”making NewsFire a unique, powerful and thoroughly enjoyable alternative among the vast world of RSS readers. With this unrivaled approach it has completely turned around my RSS reading from a strenuous chore to a brisk and delightful time. Today I will discuss how NewsFire successfully uses color and simplicity to help you read your RSS subscriptions and I will also explain that NewsFire is a powerful application which can meet the needs of journalists, bloggers or anyone else who heavily reads numerous subscriptions on regular basis.

NewsFire’s colorful and dynamic interface….it isn’t just about looks

The most defining aspect of NewsFire is its’ use strong use of colors. By using bright colors, icons and non distracting animations, NewsFire visually emphasizes various important elements making them far easier to find. One of the most excellent examples of this is the way NewsFire presents unread items. When you are presented with a list of RSS items all the items which you have not read yet are given a black font, a bright green icon which says “New” and a short summery of the item underneath the title while items which you have already read are grayed out and the summery of the item is no longer presented thus visually de-emphasizing the non important items which are your read items and strongly emphasizing the important items which are your unread items. In a similar fashion flagged items are completely highlighted in a light red color and the summaries are still presented even if you have already read the item. These contrasting visually differences between read, unread and flagged items allow you to quickly find what is important.

Equally important is NewsFire’s sidebar which makes legitimate use of beautiful icons and an entertaining animation. By default, NewsFire arranges feeds in the sidebar by their number of unread items and when one feed gains more unread items than another it moves up in the sidebar to its new rank with a slick animation. This animation isn’t simply mere “eye candy” either. It serves an important purpose. By presenting this animation is shows you where the item as moved to thus making it easier to locate. Additionally, the two different kind of items in the sidebar are given two different colors of counters. Regular items which are subscriptions are given green colored counters whereas smart feeds are given purple colored icons. Also, if you notice the smart feed counters are given a fine pinstriped pattern to the purple counter icons. Not only do these fine pinstripes help to visually emphasize the greater importance over the other items but it may also aid people who may have some sort of color blindness to identify and differentiate them from other less important items. Another delightful visual aspect of NewsFire is that it cleverly presents by each item in the sidebar with its’ newest unread item headline so you already know if a subscription is worth checking out or not.

Its’ “deliberately minimal interface”

I love interfaces which are minimally designed without sacrificing power and usability and NewsFire is the perfect example of this kind of interface. By displaying only the essential features, NewsFire enables you to clearly focus on the content in the application instead of the features of the application. Also, it makes NewsFire less intimidating and more understandable to a new user. Another aspect of the effectiveness of NewsFire’s minimal interface is the way it presents RSS items. Unlike other RSS readers, NewsFire does not use multiple columns to present information about the RSS item. For example, Mail uses several columns on both email and RSS items to present its’ creation date, author and other information. However, NewsFire only uses one column which holds the item’s name and summery. What’s great about this is that you can freely resize NewFire’s window without having to worry about the contents of the column being cut off. When you make NewsFire’s window smaller it simply moves the summery and title to a new line instead of cutting them off like other RSS applications. This allows you to conveniently use NewsFire at a small window size to save screen space without losing any functionality. Furthermore, this minimal interface provides a natural experience for exclusively using the keyboard for navigation and reading RSS items. Here’s the basic keyboard shortcuts for using NewsFire:

• Spacebar Shows next unread item
• Command-e Marks all items of a feed as read
• Command-shift-e Marks all items in all feeds as read
• Arrow keys Navigation around NewsFire
• Command-f Marks current item as read

Using these keyboard shortcuts, you can significantly increase your productivity in NewsFire.

The Power of NewsFire

There is a popular criticism of NewsFire which I completely disagree with that NewsFire can’t handle large amounts of feeds because of its minimal design thus it is not fit for journalists, bloggers or anyone else who needs to keep up with multitudes of subscriptions on a regular basis. These criticisms are most likely from people who’ve never looked into NewsFire’s organizational features such as groups, searches and smart feeds. By using groups and smart feeds you can extensively organize your masses of subscriptions. There are however some legitimate criticisms on areas where NewsFire is lacking. Gabe Jacobs over at Apple Intellect expressed his desire for a two pained viewer in NewsFire and he and many others have expressed a strong need for syncing feeds between multiple Macs similar to what NetNewsWire does. However, these few problems are heavily outweighed by the powerful features which NewsFire already has. One of the most extraordinary features of NewsFire is its search capabilities. Your probably saying now “what could be so ‘extraordinary’ about its’ search feature?” What’s extraordinary is that NewsFire’s lets you search not only your own feeds but its allows you to search on the web as well as through:

• Google Blogger
• Google Search
• Google News
• BlogDigger Audio (for searching Podcasts)

All these searches can be saved as a self updating RSS feed or if it was internal search you can save it as a smart feed. Although NetNewsWire does have a similar feature where you can search a through a variety of search engines, it doesn’t present the results in a list like NewsFire does. Instead, NetNewsWire opens the results as a webpage just like you would see in your browser and oddly doesn’t give you an option to subscribe to the search. If you want to subscribe to a search you would have to open the action menu and click “New Subscription.” Clearly NewsFire’s search approach is far more practical and convenient compared the NetNewsWire’s approach.

Another feature which I absolutely love is NewsFire’s ability to assign a color to a group so you can more easily identify a group according to what color it reminds you of. Simply select a group and hit command-i and click the color box and change its’color. Here’s a list of some of NewsFire’s other numerous features:
Smart Feeds
Post to del.icio.cious with either Pukka or Cocoalicious
Change Font Size from small to very large
Open all unread items in your browser (make sure you have your browser to open new items in tabs or you’ll might have NewsFire open hundreds of browser windows…not fun)
Send an item to MarsEdit and other desktop blogging applications
Subscribe to Podcasts
Email Item
Reset Feed

While some RSS readers have these same features what’s important is that NewsFire has these features without sacrificing the simplicity of its interface. You have NewsFire’s beautiful and simplistic interface with all these powerful features.

Conclusion

David Watanabe has created a brilliant application which uses style, color, simplicity while maintaining usability and increasing functionality. Although NewsFire does have some shortcomings which hopefully will be addressed in version 2, they probably won’t be noticed by most users. NewsFire is functional, beautiful, simple and powerful thus making it one of the most extraordinary third party applications for the Mac and it has changed my RSS reading forever.

Preview’s Annotation Tools

Annotations is a important feature which has turned Preview from a mere PDF viewer to a powerful and complete study application enabling you to take notes, highlights, underscores, cross outs, links and shapes to help you learn, remember and understand the subject of the PDF file. However, you must use these tools efficiently. Today, I am going to go over methods on how you can use annotations in a logical and practical way to increase your level of comprehension on the subject of a PDF document.

Why would you use annotations?
When you are intensely studying from a physical paper book you typically make highlights of important sentences within the book for you to remember. Additionally, you may take down notes within the pages re-explaining statements and ideas to help you to comprehend and remember them. And as you read the book you may circle sections within the book that are text or images to emphasize something.

All of these actions and more describe above can be emulated using Preview’s powerful annotations capabilities and as we move towards a time where paper books will most likely become obsolete it is crucially important that you become use to using these annotation tools. Today, books in PDF form are becoming more common thanks to sites such as Google Book Search and others. While some of the books on Google Book Search you can’t download as PDF files there still remain multitudes of public domain books worth reading such as the writings of Thomas Jefferson and more which can be downloaded.

Furthermore, it doesn’t just have to books either since you can turn any webpage or document into a PDF file on the Mac. Also, if your a developer your can take any of the multitudes of PDF documents Apple has provided on programming and use Preview’s annotations on them. For example, since I’m currently learning the Objective C programming language I have printed out source code from Xcode as a PDF file and I have describe to myself using notes how the program works. Doing so has tremendously helped reassure that I have a firm comprehension on the way the program works and doing this exercise with Preview’s annotations has forced me to more deeply study the programming book I’m learning from and as I continue to study Objective C I look upon these notes that I’ve made using Preview to remind myself how these programs work.

How to make an annotation
Since it is so easy to use annotations I thought it would be more efficient to provide a short video which visually explains how to create and adjust each type of annotation but before you watch the video here are two things to know:

• The Inspector is the window which controls the appearance of selected annotations. It also controls other aspects of the PDF document as well. Hit command-i to bring it up. Click the icon that has the red oval in the Inspector window to bring up the appearance options.
• The annotation sidebar displays a list of every single annotation.

Click here to watch


Efficient Methods on Usage and Organization of Annotations.

Now that you’ve viewed the video I can explain my efficient and practical methods for using annotations.

1. Color Coordination
When your are jotting down your numerous notes in a document and especially if its a book it is important that you devise a method of using notes by color. For example you could devise a system where all blue notes contain your thoughts and opinions on the subject matter while all your yellow notes contain your re-explaniations or analogies of it.

So why would I ever do this?
Let’s say you never created a color scheme for notes and you just finished reading a long book in Preview and you’ve taken dozens possible hundreds of notes and a few weeks later you need to find a few specific notes. Let’s say you know that your looking for notes that only contain your thoughts and ideas and only a few specific ones of that kind. So you open up the annotations sidebar and you are a presented with a barrage of notes and other annotations all using the same color and you end up looking through every single one of those notes only to find a specific few. However if you had devised a color system prior to making these notes you would’ve had to only look through the notes of one color and you would just ignore the rest. Also this method works just as well on other annotations such as highlights and shapes. For example with Highlights or Underlines you could devise a system where yellow is for important quotes and blue is for important statements. By devising a simple color scheme you can save time and increase your comprehension of the subject matter of the PDF.

2. Decide When To Highlight/Underline Something or to Surround it With A Shape
While the Shape tools will be more commonly used to identify objects in an image they can be a great way to mark important paragraphs of text that are too long to highlight or underline. For instance, I took Apple’s list of Leopard’s 300 new features and saved it as a PDF then I opened it in Preview and I took the square shape tool and selected features that I need to investigate and/or use. This keeps your documented clean, uncluttered and easy to read by using Shapes instead of highlighting or underlining in these circumstances.

3. Use certain icons to indicate certain meanings with notes

Similar to the color scheme tip it is recommended that you use a specific icon with a note to indicate its meaning. You can change a note’s icon from the inspector as shown in the video above.

Using these tips for annotations will help you in studying any kind of PDF document whether it be an article, newsletter, book, blog post you’ve saved or even sheet music and using these tools logically and neatly will always pay off in the end.

Tip: Creating RSS Widgets in Dashcode

Today, I’m going to show you how to create a widget which displays any RSS feed in Dashcode. Programming knowledge not required. Before proceeding you must have the Developer Tools installed on your Mac. If you don’t have that installed you can install it from your OSX Leopard disk.

What Dashcode is all about
Dashcode was designed for you to quickly and simply produce beautiful and compelling widgets. You can create widgets for yourself, your organization or for distribution on the web. What we are going to focus on today is making widgets for yourself.

Let’s Make Our Widget
We are going to create a widget which retrieves and displays any rss feed. Open Dashcode and click RSS. Presented before you is everything you need to create your widget. In front of you is the widget template. Double click the title “My RSS Feed” and give it the name of the site you will be providing the rss feed from. Next take the rss feed and drag and drop its url on to the part of the widget titled “Drop an RSS Feed URL Here” Now that you’ve set the rss url for the widget click “Widget Attributes” in the sidebar and in the “Widget Identifier” field replace “Untitled” for the name of the widget. Before we send it off to Dashboard we have to double check that it runs correctly. Click Run in the toolbar and if all goes well the widget will appear. Now that you’ve confirmed that it works go to File>Deploy Widget to Dashboard and your new widget will appear in Dashboard. Thats it! Just explore Dashcode and you will find other powerful widget templates you can use such as the Video Podcast template or the Photocast widget. The steps for creating most of these other widgets are almost identical to the steps provided here for an RSS Widget.

Stop Creating Folders

Ever since the advent of Spotlight most uses of folders has been unnecessary. Instead we should use Smart Folders.


What Are Smart Folders?
The name Smart Folders is actually a fancy name for a saved search. Instead of typing the same search terms over and over to find the same kind of file you would simply click a Smart Folder. They are initiated through a Finder search and then they are saved by clicking “Save” in the toolbar. These folders self update too so every time you click the Smart Folder it refreshes so the results are up to date.

Why should I use this over an ordinary folder?
The typical use of ordinary folders is for them to store a specific kind of file such as all your presentations. This is what typically happens when someone uses folders this way(I’ll use presentations as an example but this could happen with any media):

1. Initially they will save all their presentations in a folder titled “Presentations”
2. A few months of this behavior goes by and they look at their “Presentations” folder and in horror realize thats it is a tremendous discombobulated mess with various keynotes bunched up together with no organization whatsoever.
3. They then set forth to organize this mess by grouping the keynotes into kinds such as “Biology” and “History” etc and placing these keynotes relating to those subjects into sub folders
4. Now they have dozens of sub folders with titles such as: history, biology, tech, macs, tutorials etc
5. Then after while those subfolders become disorganized because there are different subjects on biology, and macs etc
6. And then….well…You get the picture

The problem began at stage one because it was completely unnecessary to create a folder only to hold presentations. In other words: to hold a specific kind. If they had created a smart folder which only showed presentations they never would have had to suffer through this dilemma. They would simply open the “Presentations” smart folder and it would display every single presentation automatically on their computer no matter where it is located on the disk. What if they only wanted to see the presentations relating to biology? Well, with the presentations smart folder open they would type into the search box the term “biology” and every presentation that contains any mention of “biology” whether its a mentioned in a keyword or in the presentation itself is displayed. So, with the Smart Folder created the only place you would save your presentation is … well … you can save it anywhere but it would probably be best to save it in the Documents folder. You don’t have to get anymore specific than that.

Here’s How
I’ve created a movie which shows several examples of Smart Folders in action. At the end of the movie you will be shown an example of Spotlight Comments. Spotlight comments are similar to keywords. You could put whole complete sentences as spotlight comments but I recommend that you use them like keywords with each keyword being separated by a comma. Also for one of the examples I used Spotlight Attributes(AND, OR, etc) which you can learn more about from this earlier post of mine.

Click here to watch movie

While there still are some legitimate reasons for using ordinary folders, a folder who’s only purpose is to hold a kind of file use a Smart Folder instead. You won’t regret it.