I’ve come to the realized that RSS is a crappy way to read news. I want my RSS reader to be a personalized daily magazine. Something I can pick up at the end of the day and browse through medium to long form articles of interest to me.

Last week I put myself on a new news-free RSS diet. I started a fresh list of RSS sources with one criteria, they need to post no more than 3 times per day or so. This rule excludes all traditional news sources, most “pro-bloggers” and link-bloggers, etc.

So far it’s been working out really well, I’ve got a manageable amount of content to digest every day and I’m finally able to keep up with web comics again, since they’re not being lost in a deluge of reposted stories.

As for real news, I keep up with that on Twitter and Reddit. Easy peasy livin’ greezy.

I still haven’t found a really great RSS reader though, but that’s another post.

David Pensato gave a really great talk about the future of social blogging. He made the keen observation that, with Facebook, Twitter and the like we are all blogging all the time.

As an experiment, I am going to challenge myself to write a blog post instead of a Facebook status update, or tweet. I’m already seeing some potential issues with this idea, more on that later.

Oh yeah, Peter Chester’s talk on measuring WordPress performance was one of the best tech talks I’ve seen, ever!  Slides are here.

Food is Appaulling, bordering on Euthenasia for the Elderly.
Tim Hortons has horribly poor quality food — loaded with hydrogenated oils, white flour and sugar. The sandwiches and soup are so laden with sodium my tongue is sore.

I’m mystified why this place is a magnet for old people. Is this some kind of end-of life instinct, like dolphins beaching themselves, to go to Tims?

One of the most common design choice that irks me is customized social media icons. Web designers seem to have an inescapable need to redesign Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, whatever.app’s icons to match the overall look and feel of the site. One one hand, I can almost understand the appeal, these logos can stick out like a sore thumb. On the other hand, that’s the entire point!

Brands like Twitter and Facebook spend massive amounts of time and money tweaking their identity. They spend even more money marketing their brand, getting it in everybody’s face. Facebook’s white ‘F’, Twitter’s blue bird are immediately recognizable. In my humble opinion, if you actually want website’s visitor to notice and use those sharing features I’m supposed to implement, it’s probably a good idea to follow the social network’s brand guidelines. If you want people to share your content or follow the @account, it’s not a great idea to have the social media icons BLEND IN WITH THE REST OF THE SITE!

I’d love to do an A/B test to examine this theory.

That was 10 days ago.

Today, to put it lightly, the game is not living up to expectations.

A short list of the reported issues with the game:

• Server capacity issues leaving game unplayable.
• Always-On “DRM” annoying gamers.
• Broken AI, causing serious gameplay issues.
• Broken simulation, in the form of incorrect population reports.
• Map size too small.

And on and on and on. Take a look at the unofficial subreddit for more details if you’re so inclined.

Many redditors and gamers in general have called foul, accusing EA and Maxis of lying and deceiving customers in an attempt to boast sales. Frankly those claims are not unfounded. EA has a history of poor customer service, etc.

But what if EA simply under estimated the number of people interested in the game. What if EA has no clue who buys their games? This would explain the utter brokeness of the servers at launch.

It might explain why they decided to release such a buggy game. If they completely failed to understand how many people would buy the game, they may have thought it would take much longer for the bugs to surface. They might have assumed they had more time to address the bugs.

The always-online gameplay model allows EA to iterate. If AI is broken, they can fix it, release a patch and instantaneously fix everyone’s experience. Iteration is good.

With Google announcing their intentions to shut down Google Reader, today seemed like the perfect day to pull off the “alpha” wrapper and release it to the wild!

At the moment, NewsWorthy only supports Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal. I’m looking for the best¹ news source in every Canadian city. If you’d like to recommend sources in your city, feel free to email me.

1. “best” means, updated frequently and intensely focused on local news

My very brief review:

• The ability to mark emails to “read later” seems clever and works fairly well. It’s smart enough to know if it’s 1am and you tell it to read an email tomorrow, you actually mean at the beginning of the next day. All “later” email get’s placed in a gmail label [mailbox]/later.
• The short/long swipe interface is cute and works fairly well. But get’s tedious with multiple emails. The app needs a better way to preform actions on multiple emails at once.
• Overall the UI is great, in general.
• I noticed that the pending email badge count is actually the number of email threads in your inbox, instead of the number of unread messages. This is acts as a great little nudge to inbox zero.

That’s all for now.

IKEA this year and The Jets return last year are not revitalizing our fair city. They are proof that we are once again a thriving “world class” city. A city Winnipeggers can be proud of, a city that is once again One Great City.

Obviously IKEA and The Jets are two huge milestones. But there is a lot of other developments underway. Almost 2 years ago I wrote a post on /r/Winnipeg about how great I thought 2013 would be. As examples of the city’s progress I listed:

• IKEA
• 5 Target stores
• An NHL team (cross your fingers)
• Canadian Human rights museum
• At least, two more awesome buildings downtown (Avenue building and Royal Bank renovations)
• New Airport
• A bunch of completed infrastructure projects (Disraeli, Osborne St Bridge, West Perimeter upgrades)
• Phase 1 of BRT
• alcohol in grocery stores (hopefully)
• New Bombers stadium at the U of M
• Renovated Children’s Museum
• New area code (431)

I’m sure there are tonnes and tonnes of smaller projects that could be added to the list.

The classic Winnipeg apathy and self-loathing that has been such a part of the Winnipeg zeitgeist for as long as I can remember is no longer relevant.  The proof is in the lingonberry pudding.

He already listens to No Agenda, Industrial Strength Nightmares and Planet Money based on my recommendation, I won’t be covering those here.

By now, I’m sure most of you have read a Windows 8 review or two. So I’ll keep this brief, I’m going to go over a few areas that stood out to me.

Unfortunately, they were not able to lend me a review unit, so this review will have to be based on a 7 day old memory.

Unique

Live Tiles

The new Windows 8 “start screen” (pictured above) is made up of a series of re-sizable, re-positionable “live tiles.” Live tiles are the single most distinguishing feature of Windows 8, they are the blocky user-interface elements that tie the operating system together across devices. Windows Phones have live tiles, the tablet and desktop implementations have live tiles and the xbox has adopted a UI the resembles live tiles somewhat.

I’m going to be honest, live tiles make icons looks old fashioned. Live tiles are constantly updating with new data from the internet: the weather app shows you an up to date forecast, the “people” app shows you icons of your friends who’ve recently posted an update to any (any!) social network, the news app gives you breaking news, you get the idea. There is simple no way to accomplish this with your standard 32x32 iOS or desktop app, Android’s gadgets are a step in the right direction. But I have to say, I think Microsoft is on to something.

“Optimized for thumbs”

Windows 8 seems to be designed to function best on a tablet in landscape mode. I suspect Microsoft sees this as a distinguishing feature in-and-of-itself, when compared side by side with other tablet OSes which are designed for portrait view. The soccer mom rep really emphasized that Windows 8 is “optimized for thumbs” (as if it were an un-marketed catchphrase). Much like the Blackberry playbook, Windows 8 attaches gestures to the edges of the screen. The right edge brings up cross-app search, universal “sharing”, the start button, device and start screen settings. The left gesture cycles through open app. I’m mentioning this as a unique feature, not necessarily a good one. These edge of screen swipe gestures always strike me as a little clunky.

Picture Unlock

Instead of setting an alpha-numeric, Windows 8 allows you to customize your login background imagine, which you then use as a reference for tracing a “password”. For example, the music guy had his a photograph of his hotrod, he traced around the headlights and left fender to unlock the device. I’m always fascinated by the length manufacturers have to go to get avoid patent infringement. I’m not really sure what sort of affect this will have on actual security — positive or negative.

Pinning

I think that’s what they called it. Windows 8 is designed around full-screen apps. All apps open to take up the entire screen. This has some fairly obvious workflow implications, as Jacob Neilsen mentioned this sort of takes away from the whole “Windows” idea. Some apps — like MSN message — don’t really make sense as full screen apps.

To get around this, you’re able to “pin” apps to the left 1/3rd of the screen. When you execute a gesture the current active window becomes “pinned” app switches from a landscape view, to portrait and sit on the screen while you have other apps open. In my limited use, I wasn’t really able to gauge how practical this would be in actual use.

The Good

There is not a lot of good.

The main thing that really struck me was the integration of previously disparate Microsoft brands. They are re-focusing their music, video and game/app stores under the Windows 8 brand. No more “Windows Live Messenger email” and “Xbox 360 game store.” Like an AppleID, everything is tied to a Windows ID. All of your store purchases are available on any Windows 8 device you own. This sort of integration is table stakes for any OS in 2012 — it’s good to see Microsoft finally catching up.

Xbox presents the most interesting aspect of the unified store. You can buy a cross-platform game like Angry Birds and instantly have access to it on your Windows Phone, Surface and xbox. Presumably full-fledged Xbox games are able to have Windows Phone compatible mini-games. Genius.

Oh, and Windows Music.

Microsoft have managed to cobble together a competitor for Rdio and Spotify. For $9.99 you get access to 30 million song across all Windows devices including xbox (though you’ll have to have a $60/yr “gold” account to access the service on your xbox).

The Really Bad

The Desktop App

All legacy apps and non-native Windows 8 applications run inside (what Microsoft is branding) the “desktop app.” As far as I can tell, this is the Windows 7 desktop, minus a start button. It behaves very simliar to every version of Windows we’ve seen in the past 17 years since Windows 95 — in fact, it looks pretty similar to Windows 95, only bubblier. According to the PR reps the desktop app is for “productivity,” whatever that means. On a traditional desktop PC, desktop app is a good option for desktop users who will undoubtedly need to run legacy apps, or who may have a hard time using and adjusting to the radical new “start screen” UI.

Unfortunately, on tablet hardware, the desktop app utterly destroys the user experience. I inadvertently asked the rep to show me task manager (which is oddly linked on the “log out” screen), upon loading task manager the Surface hiccups into the desktop app…I nearly vomited in my mouth, suddenly a reasonably nice tablet experience was interrupted by this antiquated GUI.

BTW, Microsoft Office for Windows 8 runs in the desktop app.

Soft Cover Keyboard

It’s unusable.

Conclusion

I have very mixed feelings about Windows 8. Microsoft is doing a lot of things right. They’ve essentially built a responsive operating system that works well across different devices and screen configurations. Live tiles are a real step forward in UI. The brand unification, music streaming and app stores are long needed improvements.

In other ways, it’s bad. The Live tile based start screen UI is going to alienate a lot of traditional desktop users, it simply doesn’t work well without touch input.

If I was presently running Windows 7, I probably wouldn’t upgrade.

If I was in the market for tablet, I would consider a Windows 8 device.