Speeed Reader, Google Reader client for WinMobile

A couple months ago I found Speeed Reader, a Windows Mobile client to access Google Reader accounts. Yes it’s Speeed, with three “e” in it.

I wasn’t using my Google Reader account anymore exactly for the reason that it was difficult to access it from my WinMo phone, so when I read of this software I decided immediately to try it.

And let me say that Speeed Reader is exactly what I needed… and probably what you need if you have a Google Reader account. And use Windows Mobile.

The interface is simple: after logging in (you can ask Speeed Reader to login automatically when launched) the application loads all the feeds grouped by “tag” (as you categorized them in Google Reader) and shows an indicator reporting the number of unread items in each tag / category.

You can browse the tags, and see all the feeds in it, open a feed and read the posts.

There are (and I find this particularly useful) some tools to share the posts through twitter / email / sms. And you can set refresh intervals, if you want.

The reading is very good, Speeed Reader does a pretty good job in rendering tags and downloading images. There is the possibility to tell the application to cache a fixed number of article, and read them in “offline” mode".

Did I tell you that it’s also very fast? Right now this is one of the most used apps in my device.

You can download a trial version of Speeed Reader 1.11 from this url: http://emuneee.com/2010/01/speeed-reader-v1-11/ then if you like it you can reach it in Handango for $1.99, exactly here: http://www.handango.com/catalog/ProductDetails.jsp?storeId=2218&deviceId=1925&platformId=30&productId=264566

I think that for $1.99 this is a must-have.

Now some screenshots. First the tags list:

Then some articles from LifeHacker.com:

This is one article from the Speeed Reader blog:

Some menu entries:

Another “skin” applied (the list is from Seth Godin’s blog):

The sharing options available:

Happy reading with Speeed Reader! :-)

Andrea

This post is boring.

The web is an exciting place, isn’t it?

Well, sometimes not so much.

I encountered only a couple days ago the “Dullest Blog in the World”, at dullestblog.com – and found it addictive in a strange, unexpected way.

The boring aspect of this is that the blog is not even updated, and this is perfectly “in style” with the blog.

An article on this Dullest Blog appeared some weeks ago on MSNBC here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27792365/?pg=1#Tech_PCWorld_11LamestBlogs 

A site that around here had a huge success, and that is “useless” more than “boring”, is http://www.zombo.com “you can do anything on zombo com” is the site’s claim.

And now I found also a Twitter account that looks promising, http://twitter.com/dullestweet – more or less in the same mood of the mentioned blog.

Any other recommendations for “boring” sites?

last things i’m trying

Let’s see, what are my main addictions lately? I have to make choices here, as I’m one of those guys that sign on almost everything… :-) I’ll choose only a couple of tools, and talk about the last one registered.

First of all Twitter – yes, ok, I know everybody is upset with all the dontime and everything, but I really like it and find it useful.

Then: I’m using Evernote, and I think that it is a really great app. It has clients on web (ok, obvious), Windows desktop, and Windows Mobile. And this mix of supported platforms is perfect for me :-)

Latest thing: today I read a tweet about this Scoutle thing, and I decided to give it a try: as you can see here on the right column, i have my scoutle Badge… let’s see if it works!!!

and now… back to my last working day, tomorrow sardegna for two weeks!!! I’ll stay here, and be back @ work on july 23. Bye!!!

p.s.: the photo here is taken on the beach of the camping I’ll stay in from tomorrow :-)

Flickr4Writer

This blog post will benefit of a Flickr photo taken from a LiveWriter Plugin, Flickr4Writer.

The plugin allows to choose an image from Flickr, given a subject, a tag set, a flickr photo album...

A step towards something I'd like, that is having the blog system choose a random photo for me every time, using the post's tag set to query Flickr.

If I only had some time... :-)

How to backup a Blogger blog

If you want to have a backup of your Blogger-hosted blog, read this: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-backup-blogger-blog.html

WM5, iPhone, Apple, and bloggers

Referring to the previous post, regarding the "iPhone skin" for Windows Mobile, I want to add something.

In the picture below you can see the two layout, compared... left WM5, right iPhone. Now, the look & feel is great, no? But it's only a joke... I'm sure that anybody with some Photoshop skills and Windows Mobile knowledge has already done again the "skin". And I', sure that Apple has more to it that the simple layout of the "home" screen... so why put all this money and energy in suing bloggers?

Please read this TechCrunch article for a better coverage of the whole matter.

Windows Live Writer - a desktop app for your blog

Recently I started using Windows Live Writer (Beta) to create the post you're reading.

It's a desktop application for Windows, and the main characteristics are:

- works with windows live spaces, but also with Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, and others

- wysiwyg editor

- you can post images and "live local" maps

It works, I have all my blogs fed with this app, and i'm happy with it. You can have a "web preview", or modify html directly.

Yesterday I switched my blogs to beta.blogger.com, and Live Witer didn't manage to write anything on them... so I checked  http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/ and actually they posted a new release that works with the new api spec from beta.blogger.com.

Thanks... :-)

HubDog

I'm using HubDog from some time, and I'm quite happy with it.
It delivers a sort of RSS feed reader, with a good user interface, it's stable, and it can consume also audio/video *casts.

Hundog is "hubdog - centric", in the sense that you must have an HubDog account to have it working, and the list of your feeds is (actually it "can be") shared with others. And this is both a bad and a good thing.
A bad thing because maybe you're not happy to have HubDog know about your chisen feeds - a good one because you can search between other HubDog users feeds, thus discovering new interesting feeds you didn't know about.

Any way, HubDog is now at the 2.0 release. Link: http://www.hubdog.com/