Picked up Mario Kart for the wii. No real impressions yet since I’ve only done 1 50cc circuit so far. Only thing I’ve noticed so far is that I’ve missed the first turn of every race. I keep hitting the directional pad instead of turning the wheel. Need to get rid of some old habits.
My friend code is 0087-2707-0051
In the end it took me about 15 minutes to decide to purchase Rivet. It has fantastic performance and options, without cost to your computer’s performance, all for a mere $18.95…
It’s not often that I spend money on software, but products like Rivet that show an unrivaled level of polish make the decision easy. I want it to work without hassle, and Rivet delivers just that.
Very nice review of Rivet by Jared. I love getting to read write ups like that about my apps.
One neat feature of Cyndicate is the ratings feature. As you read each article you can give it a star rating from 1 to 5. You can then sort and organize articles by their rating. The rating can be set by either having the rating column showing in the article table and clicking in it or by selecting a rating from the Ratings menu that is in the Article menu.
The really cool part of it is that Cyndicate will learn what you like based on the rating and will then automatically rate new articles as they are fetched. This allows you to do really useful stuff like making a smart folder that shows new articles with a 4 or 5 star rating to quickly get caught up with the news that you find most interesting. It can be a huge time savings when you’re trying to cut through the cruft.
The automatic rating system does take a little time to learn your likes and dislikes. The more articles you rate, the more accurate it will become. Remember to mark down articles you don’t like as well as marking up articles you do like. The system works best when you’re telling it both you’re likes and dislikes so that it can weigh the two against each other.
You can think of it like the spam filter in your email client. It get gets better at correctly marking spam the more you mark email as being spam and unmark the emails that it incorrectly marked as spam. The only difference being that Cyndicate takes a little bit more work to teach then email spam. This is do to the nature of the content. We can all pretty much agree that the viagra or mortgage email is spam so they can give some default matching data, but with news articles what you like and dislike can be vastly different then the next guy. Take a political blog for instance, a Republican will mostly likely rate the articles in a very differently, perhaps completely opposite, than what a Democrat might rate the same articles. So have a little bit of patience with it at the start. It will pay off in the long run.
Cynical Peak Software wants to have some fun this year with the NCAA Mens Basketball Tournament. We’re announcing the first Cynical Peak Bracket Challenge. It’s time to see who has the best basketball IQ (really, it’s not luck, I knew the 16 would beat the 1). Prizes, in the form of software licenses, will be awarded to the top prognosticators. We haven’t finalized the prize structure yet, stayed tuned for it. The final structure will partially be determined by how many entries we receive. The more entries, the more we’re going to give away.
To sign up, go to Yahoo’s tournament site to create your entry. You need to join the group CynicalPeak (Group ID# 91032) with the password cyndicate. Finally fill out your bracket and have fun watching the tournament.
Yahoo’s tourney site: http://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/
Group: CynicalPeak (Group ID# 91032)
Pass: cyndicate
All entries must be received before the start of the first game Thursday, March 20th. Yahoo will automatically lock them down at the start the game. Multiple entries are allowed, but prizes are limited to one per person. Your highest scoring bracket will be the only one considered when prizes are awarded. Employees of Cynical Peak Software are not eligible. I have a bracket in, but it’s only good for bragging rights and will not be considered when awarding prizes.
Cyndicate offers another organizational tool that’s similar to the filters features talked about in the last article, smart folder. Smart folders work like filters except that filters move the article to a different folder while smart folders show all messages that match the conditions without moving the articles. The articles will automatically appear and disappear from the smart folder as they meet the conditions of the smart folder.
The biggest, and I’d say the best, use of smart folders is for a temporary alternate view of your articles. Keep regular folders for the long term structure and smart folders short term viewing. A couple common uses it to have a smart folder that shows unread articles from today or one that displays all articles that you have flagged.
Another use of smart folders, and a really powerful one that sets Cyndicate apart from the other news readers, is to make a smart folder that displays articles that are unread and have a rating of 4 or 5. Since articles are being automatically rated as they are received, the smart folder will display the new articles that are most likely to be of interest to you. This is great for the times when you’re running short on time and want to catch up with the news that’s most important to you, leaving the rest of the articles for later when you have more time to read through them.
In the introduction I talk about Cyndicate giving you more control and power over your news, but where does the power come from? A large portion of it come from the combination of folders and filters. The combo of the two allow you to set up how you’d like to view the day’s news and then forget about the day-to-day minutia of managing it. You can sit back and take in all of the info in a manner that makes the most sense to you.
The first step in organizing your news is to set up a folder structure to house the articles. They can range from broad topics like skiing to narrower topics like Telluride skiing and anywhere in-between. You want to set them based on how many articles you’ll be receiving on their subject to keep the numbers to a manageable size. Using sub-folders can help the organization too since you can then start with a broad topic and then get more specific with the subfolders. For example have a Skiing folder with subfolders on Colorado, Utah, and Montana.
Another nice thing about creating sub-folders is that they allow you to easily adjust the granularity. When a parent folder is collapsed, it will show all of its articles plus any articles that are in its sub-folders. So using the skiing example, during the winter it would makes sense to have the folder expanded and view by the sub-folder since the traffic will be heavy. But in the summer when new article are going to be slow, collapse the parent folder and view all of the articles at once.
Once you have your folder structure set up you want to set up filters to automate the sorting of new articles as they are fetched. The most common filters you will make are matching on the feed or the content of the title or body of the article. How you set them up will really depend on the feeds you subscribe to and the way you organize your articles. Using the skiing folder structure from above, you could create a filer that matches on title for each of the states with the action being to move the article into the corresponding folder. Then for feeds that are specific to one location, say Vale’s snow condition feed, make a filter that matches on the feed and moves it to the Colorado folder.
The possibilities of how to organize and filter your feeds are endless. Play around with the options a bit and find out what works best for you.
I’m going to start a series on Cyndicate that will cover features of it that you might not be aware of and tips on using it. My goal is to show you the some of the power built into the app and give an look at the concepts behind it. The later is something that seems to give people the most problems the first time they look at Cyndicate. They try to use it by using the concepts and paradigms that they’ve learned from all of the other new aggregators. Cyndicate takes a different approach that takes a little getting used to, but one you “get” it, you have a lot more power over your daily news.
The biggest difference to understand is how feeds and articles are treated. In other readers, the feed is the main item with articles attached to it. The feed has a bit of control over how long the article lives in the reader and most of the organization is done around it. You group feeds together in folders and don’t have much control over the articles.
Cyndicate takes a much finer grain approach and uses the article itself as the primary unit. The feed is simply a conduit that delivers articles to you. Once you receive that delivery of articles, they are decoupled from the feed and can be acted upon based on their own merits. You no longer have to keep articles together based on the mechanism that delivered them to you. You can now organize based on any criteria that you choose. This can be the author, content, category, or anything else that you wish to use. You have full control. The articles will always act independently no matter what happens to the feed that came from.
Stay tuned. I plan on covering the features give you that control and hopefully some ideas on how to best use it for your own purposes.
I found a bug today with Xcode’s refactoring tool (radar://5723465) that could be a headache if you don’t watch for it. If you refactor the name of a method, calls to used through an @selector, like [self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(someMethod:) withObject:obj waitUntilDone:NO], will not be changed. You have to pick those up yourself. This could be a headache since it won’t be caught until runtime.
MJD:
On more than one occasion this year, Bill Belichick and the Patriots have run up the score on an overmatched opponent, and forced an opposing coach to sit there and watch his beaten team go through the motions while their heineys were being handed to them.
But when the shoe’s on the other foot, and Bill Belichick’s team has been beaten, he can’t sit there and take the pain for a few seconds.
Belichick showed how much class and sportsmanship he has yesterday when he walked off the field before the game was over. It was typical of how arrogant he’s been all season and throughout his career. Pat’s fans, this is why everyone was against and don’t like the Patriots.
Was anyone else hoping Coughlin would kick a field goal when the Giants got the ball back with :01 left? I knew he wouldn’t, but it would have been great to see after the running up that Belichick did all season. I’d probably 75-25 odds that good ol’ Bill would have done it.
In the latest episode of The Mac Developer Roundtable, Andy Matuschak talks about machine learning as a new direction for user interfaces. One of the examples he gives of a good use of it would to tell him in the morning which of the 200 unread articles he should read in the few minutes he has before leaving for class. This is a really good use of machine learning and one I’m happy to say Cyndicate can handle for him (or anyone). The functionality can be achieved by combining two of Cyndicate’s features, automatic ratings and smart folders.
Automatic ratings takes care of the machine learning part of the equation. As you rate articles while reading, Cyndicate learns what you like and don’t like. Then when new articles are received Cyndicate will give it a rating based on your history. Think of it as your email spam filter in reverse. Instead of trying to decide what it spam, it tried to figure out what you would be interested in. The system works really well once you get it trained.
Smart folders are the other part of the equation. Cyndicate’s smart folders include rules to filter based on the article’s rating. So if you make a smart folder with rules to show unread articles and articles with a five star (and maybe four star) ratings you will achieve Andy’s example. Every morning you’ll have a list of four or five star articles to quickly read through that is based on what you’ve liked in the past.