Zhephree

Just a quick update on Fez.

I’ve been cleaning up some things and fixing some bugs with the core reading experience and feed fetching. I think we’re pretty solid on that front.

So, I added a new, fairly unique feature: SmartTags.

SmartTags are just like regular tags, but they’re far more powerful. They’re sort of like the Smart Playlists in iTunes. Basically, you add a SmartTag by giving it a name, and then supply some criteria for what entries should end up with that SmartTag.

I’ll give a real-world example.

Let’s say Apple has a keynote event happening tomorrow. You could create a SmartTag for any entry that has “apple” in the title or the summary. Then, as new entries come in, they’ll be analyzed and if they have “apple” in the title or the summary, they’ll be tagged and show up in the apple SmartTag folder.

Here’s what it looks like when adding a new SmartTag:

The Name is what you’ll see in the sidebar. That’s just something for you to identify the SmartTag. The Query is where things get interesting. You can enter in a simple word like “apple” by itself and everything will work really well. But, the Query can also be a Regular Expression. Using RegEx, you can create some very complex queries, like maybe tag any entry that contains “apple” but not “wwdc”.

In addition to powerful Queries, you can select whether the Query will be applied against the title of the entry, the summary of the entry, or both. This can be handy for simple words like “apple”. It might be better to search the title only so any food blog entries you follow don’t get erroneously tagged.

And the final option is a simple checkbox. Checking the “Remove Entries When Read” box will do just that: any entry that shows up in that SmartTag’s folder will be be un-SmartTagged once you read it. This is especially useful when following current events.

This is just one of the ways I’m trying to have Fez work the way you work and the way the web works. I hope I can share Fez with you guys soon! I’m trucking away and trying to get it done. Stay tuned!

Welp, I’ve decided on a name, and I’m pretty happy with it. My web-based RSS reader will be called Fez.

I’m pretty pleased with logo, mostly.

Fez isn’t ready yet, but the progress is pretty great. It looks pretty, too. I’ve talked a lot about Fez in bits and pieces, but I figured I’d put it all together here.

Initially, Fez will be available for a subscription rate (on a sliding scale — you pick the amount you think is fair), with discounts for paying for 6 months or a year up front. This will support development and server costs.

Shortly there after (or maybe at the same time if I keep rocking), there will be a one-time purchase for a self-hosted version of Fez you can install on your own web server if you’d like more control over where your data is stored. Plus, this option will be cheaper since you only pay once.

There will be a light social layer on top of Fez, allowing users to share articles with each other within Fez. This will still work for self-hosted Fez users — you’ll be able to share with and get shares from subscription users as if you’re all on the same system. Accounts will be standard Zhephree accounts, so if you use neato! on iOS, Android, or webOS, you’ve already got an account.

Additionally, there will be ways to share articles via other social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, or time-shifting apps like Pocket or Instapaper. Similar to how Google Reader offered an option to add your own sharing methods by using variables in a URL, you’ll be able to add your own share destinations, as well as use ones created by other users. So, let’s say you want to share to some new website and support for it doesn’t exist in Fez yet, you’ll be able to add support in by supplying the URL and filling in some variables, like URL and title for the article:

http://example.com/share?url={url}&title={title}

The actual method will be more elegant, but that gives you the idea.

In addition to subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds, you’ll also be able to subscribe to Facebook Pages. You’ll just add the URL to the Facebook Page like you would an RSS feed, and boom, it pulls in just like an RSS feed does, with no need to visit Facebook to see what your favorite local business or band is up to. There are plans to support other networks in the future, but Facebook will be available at launch.

And Fez will have all the typical features of an RSS reader — marking read/unread, starring to bookmark, tagging, etc. The idea is to make Fez a great RSS reader with some unobtrusive bells and whistles, as well as keeping it flexible for how you use the web.

Fez will be web-only, but will be mobile-friendly. After the core-Fez product is stable and working nicely, an API will be opened up for developers to build apps upon, but this will be quite some time later. The plan is for the API to be built into self-hosted versions of Fez also so you can use apps with your own domain.

So, here are some screenshots! Keep in mind, this is still in Alpha stages and isn’t even running on a staging server, let alone a production server. Stuff can and will likely change form what you see here.

This is the main feed view, in the “summary” view, one of four views for feeds.

This is the main feed view, in the “grid” view. This works really well for feeds that aren’t just text and frequently contain images.

This is the view menu. Each feed remembers the last view you selected for it, so if you want grid view for a specific feed all the time, it’ll remember this and always display it as a grid.

Tagging happens in-line via a pop-out text field so you don’t have to navigate away.

All of Fez will be navigable via the keyboard as well.

You will also be able to import your Google Reader subscriptions when you sign up for Fez, so you won’t have to worry about starting over from scratch.

I don’t have an ETA for Fez, but I have a goal to finish it before the July 1st death day of Google Reader.

So, that’s it for now, but more to come!

I had to take a bit of a break from working on my RSS reader for a few days because holy hell have things been busy around here, but I’m back to it this week and have built some cool stuff.

I focused on the tagging system. It had to be done right, and it had to work and work fast. With some trickery of my rad database schema and some other fancy footwork, I’ve got a nice, fast, reliable tagging system. Here’s what it looks like when you go to tag an entry:

Type in your tags, hit enter, and boom. Entry is tagged. You can see all your tags in the sidebar on the left:

Nothing too fancy here, and nothing really innovative, but it’s working and looks good.

I also added a new feature that is pretty awesome and pretty exclusive to my reader and I haven’t felt like discussing it until now because I don’t want people to steal my idea, but hey, whatever!

So, I’ve gotten really good at working with APIs from social networks and normalizing their data, what with my foursquare work and my work on incredible! (webOS app that created a single stream of all your social network feeds). I figured I’d bring that expertise into this project and since fewer people are getting their news from RSS exclusively, I’d build this in.

As of right now, only Facebook is supported, but I plan to add more (possibly Twitter if I can work with their ToU for their API). Basically, when you go to add an RSS feed to the reader, you type/paste in the URL of a website or a feed. However, you’ll be able to paste in the URL of a Facebook Page and have that Page’s posts appear in your reader just like an RSS feed.

It looks and functions exactly like an RSS feed, but the content is from Facebook. I plan to only support Pages and not individuals’ profiles since that’s not the focus of this project, but I am working on allowing you to add individuals’ Facebook posts to your reader if that user has a public profile and allows subscribers, since those are usually public figures.

I’ve figured out a way to be able to add a Twitter feed and store data about the tweets without violating Twitter’s ToU, but I haven’t worked out how or if I need to obey the display guidelines for tweets (since this isn’t a client trying to replicate the core Twitter experience). So, don’t count on Twitter support out of the box.

Anyway, I’m trying to keep RSS relevant, but also recognize that people are using the web differently now to get news and information.

I hope to have some more good stuff to share next week. I have 2 names picked out for the app, and a logo designed for each. I originally said I wouldn’t ask for people’s input, but I might anyway. We’ll see!

Another brief update on my upcoming RSS reader. First, as promised, here’s a preview of the Grid view for feeds:

(Click to embiggen) Each feed will remember the last view you had it in, so if you have a feed that’s all text, maybe the list view with summaries is best, but a feed with a mix of text and images would be better in a Grid view. You’ll also be able to set the default view for all feeds in your settings.

I made some enhancements to the XML parsing engine I’m using. The reader will now handle UTF-8 encoded feeds properly, and it can handle malformed XML feeds, so if the feed has missing tags or invalid XML characters or things not escaped properly, the feed should still load. I’ve also broadened its ability to parse XML feeds that have non-standard elements, like an RSS feed using the Atom feed <content> element instead of RSS’s <description> element. The idea is to have the reader be flexible so you won’t miss out on any content. 

I’ve also begun work on reading an individual entry, but I’ll wait to share that until it’s done.

Oh, also, last time I shared screenshots? Those were Photoshop mock-ups. This one up there is a real-live web page with actual data from my personal blog (and Daring Fireball and Marco.org). 

Major strides, but still more to go. I will have this done before Google Reader shuts down on July 1st, and my goal is to have it finished LONG before then.

I’m about to begin work on importing your Google Reader feeds and also your starred items from Google Reader, so hopefully when you start using my reader, you’ll be able to make it feel like home right away.

Additionally, I’m about to start work on “social feeds”. The web is different these days and you get content from more than just RSS feeds. My reader is aiming to help you with that. More on that later.

• Question: How can I manage my devices for Neato? Because I want to remove a device from the list. - lifeinamillionmotions
• Answer:

  log in at http://neatoit.com and you’ll be taken straight to the Devices page where you can remove or rename any device.

I figured as a sign of good faith that, yes, I am actually building my RSS reader, (working under the working title of AlphaBeta) I’d share some early screenshots! Everyone loves screenshots!

Obviously, these are early and are subject to change. Not all buttons and features are visible in these shots yet, so if something obvious isn’t there (like, mark all as read) don’t worry — it’ll be there in the final product.

On to the eye candy!

(Click image to embiggen) This is the view of a single feed. There will be a massive “All Subscriptions” view, like in Reader, but this is just viewing an individual feed. Clicking the eye icon gives you a pop-up menu with 3 viewing options: Titles Only (looks like this, but no article summaries and is more compact), Summaries (the view you see), and Grid (which will hopefully be awesome as hell and not end up looking like Pinterest). The gear icon will be settings for this feed, like the name, the URL, a way to unsubscribe, etc. I’m toying with the idea of letting you set each feed to its own view style. Each feed is going to be different, so maybe a feed of the Astronomy Picture of the Day would be better suited in the grid format, as opposed to Titles Only. Actually, I like that. Let’s add that as a feature. I just invented it while typing this. It’s like you’re watching me think.

Now, that third item in the list is blue because the mouse is hovering over it. That’s how you know what entry you’ll be acting on when you click it. Clicking on an item changes the context of the whole page (no refresh) with the item in a sort of reading-friendly format (that’ll work nicely for image and video feeds, too). This is how that looks:

(Click image to embiggen) As you can see, you keep your sidebar, but the list becomes the entire entry in a clean and readable way. This is an RSS feed that shares full articles in the feed, btw. The reader will not scrape websites for the full article if the feed only provides article summaries.

On either side of the entry you have some left and right arrows. These will move to the previous and next items in the list, respectively. Yes, there will be keyboard navigation, too.

There’s still a ton more to do, but things are moving nicely. Favicons for the sites will also be visible throughout the site, so that plaintext list of feeds in the sidebar is only temporary.

There’s no logo visible because I haven’t decided on a name yet. I have two options and Rhea and I are the only ones that know them. I’ve made a logo for one of the names, and my plan is to make the logo for the second name and then I’ll decided between the two. I’m really happy the logo I created for the one I’ve done, so if the second one is as good, this’ll be tough. I probably won’t do a vote for the name because I have a feeling whatever one wins I’ll be like “But… maybe I like the other one better?” and nothing will get done.

Anyhoo, I’m bustin’ my hump trying to knock this out as quickly as possible while still maintaining awesomeness.

At any rate, I’m getting more and more excited by the day.

Today, something cool happened. 

Flashback to 2010. The mobile OS world was getting shaken up by a little OS called webOS. I got this crazy idea to build an app that would let you send links and text from your web browser to your phone, almost instantly. That app got released later in 2010. It got some popularity and got a fair amount of press on (at the time) PreCentral.

At first, it did one thing: let you send data from your computer to your phone in a fraction of a second, very similar to Android’s Chrome-to-Phone. The app required you to use a 5 character code to send data to and from your computer, which was a bit cumbersome. About a month later, I added the ability to send data from your phone to your computer, via browser extensions. It also got a make over a few months later.

As you can see from that App Catalog screenshot, it also won Best Utility App of 2010. I also added the ability to share data between phones using a “Friend code” given to you by a friend.

neato! sold very well and was a pretty standard app on any webOS user’s phone. That November, I was asked by HP (the new owners of Palm and webOS) to fly to New York and speak at their developers’ conference, which you can watch in this YouTube video, at about the 4:20 mark. 

Fast forward a while to when disaster came to the webOS community and HP killed webOS. This left neato! in a lurch. However, HP didre-license their new JavaScript framework Enyo so that developers of webOS apps built with Enyo could be built for other mobile OSes via PhoneGap (now Cordova) and also run in various web browsers. The only issue was that neato! was developed using the old JavaScript framework, Mojo, which was not licensed to use on other OSes. So neato! hung around as a webOS app for a while.

Until recently when I rebuilt neato! from the ground up using Enyo. 

It got a new look, and ditched the code system. Now, users had usernames and passwords and could add unlimited devices to their account, and log in on the website to send and receive content to and from their computers without needing to remember a silly code.

But possibly the best part of this was that neato! could now run on iOS and Android as well! So instead of just being able to send text or URLs from your browser to your webOS phone or tablet, you could send from your webOS tablet to your Android phone, or from your iPad to your computer or your iPhone to your iPad or any other combination.

And today, neato! has grown up from a simple little thing I did in 2010, to an app running on three mobile OSes and 3 different web browsers, all thanks to EnyoJS and PhoneGap, and the little push Palm (and later HP) and the webOS community gave me all those years ago.

I’m really happy to have neato! launched and will get it out on Windows Phone in short order, bringing the total number of platforms to 4, plus the desktop via web browsers.

You can learn more about neato! on neatoit.com and find links to purchase it from the webOS App Catalog, Google Play store for Android, and the iTunes App Store on iOS.

Consider this my official announcement of my RSS reader. 

In case you’ve missed it, Google is shutting down Google Reader on July 1. Just last week, I was telling my wife that this would probably happen this year (not knowing it’d be like 5 days later) and so I was setting out to build my own web-based RSS reader.

It has no name yet (in development I’m calling it AlphaBeta), but it does have a general feature set that I’m willing to share with you, though, as this software is still in development, any of this can possibly change.

The plan is to build a solid RSS reader with the standard features you love from Reader, but clean it up, bring it into the modern age, and make it something you continue to use every day.

RSS is beloved by many to this day, and nearly every website has a feed, so for the time being, RSS is still somewhat relevant. However, as social networks grow and become easier to use, RSS takes a deeper back seat. And that’s where my project aims to go — to take the way you use the web today and prepare it for tomorrow.

In addition to standard RSS reader features, you’ll find social integration for easy sharing to other networks, and internal sharing among other users of my product, something Google Reader lost recently. 

One of the core beliefs I’m instilling into this product is that anything you put into it is yours. You’ll be able to download your data for import elsewhere. There will be an API to pull data for whatever purpose you want (build an app!).

Not only that, but a special build of the application will be developed so that you can download, install, and host it on your own web server. This way, you have the database and all related source code on your machine, so (god forbid) my app doesn’t exist anymore, you’ve still got a fully functioning RSS reader and you won’t be left in a lurch like with Google Reader. And self-hosted installs of the reader will allow you to still be friends with other Zhephree-hosted users AND other self-hosted users, without the need for a central server (whaaaa?!). It’s like BitTorrent for RSS, but not at all so don’t quote me on that.

I plan to add more bells and whistles (stats, etc) as development continues.

Now, you may have noticed I’ve referred to it as a product — this is deliberate. I’m one guy, paying for servers out of my pocket. I gotta fund this somehow. So, my reader will be a paid service. I haven’t settled on dollar amounts yet (and I’m toying with allowing you to pay on a sliding scale so you pay what you want), but the tiers will be: monthly, 6 months, or a full year for the Zhephree-hosted service, with “bulk” discounts for paying in advance for 6 months and a year.

Additionally, the self-hosted option will come at a fee slightly above the full-year Z-hosted version, and will included updates (though I haven’t decided if that would be incremental/maintenance updates only, or if it’d include full version number bumps).

It will not be open source, but the self-hosted option’s license will allow you to modify it for personal use so long as you don’t redistribute it, whether for free or a fee. Hey, it’s on your server, do what you want.

RSS is important to me in how I get news, and I know it is for a lot of you. And owning my content is important to me. I’m trying to merge those ideas together.

Keep watch here and on my Twitter account (@zhephree) and my App.net account (@gauchet) for news and updates on development.

The biggest question I’ve gotten is if this will be ready by July 1st and my answer is that my plan is to have it done well before July. I won’t decide on a specific date just yet, but yes, it will be available before July 1, and if something come sup where that won’t happen, you’ll hear about it immediately, though I don’t see that happening.

Remember, since I’m early in the development phase, all of this is subject to change, even though I feel pretty confident.

Hey, it’s me, Geoff, Zhephree, app developer guy person thing. Anyhoo, I wanted to keep you guys up to date on what’s happening (Raj has started hanging out with the wrong crowd!).

neato! is currently wrapping up development and is in beta for Android, iOS, webOS, and Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and IE 8+. I hope to get it finished very very soon, and then I can work on getting the Windows Phone version out shortly thereafter. (Android/iOS/webOS/web beta testers — a new build is forthcoming).

I’ve also started work on a new project that is focused on Android and will be a tool for Android developers. It’s a pretty big project, but I think it’s going to be pretty awesome and can be a huge help for Android developers. It’s something I wish I had during neato! development. I can’t really give anymore details than that.

I’ve also got three small app ideas that’ll be simple, but things I’ve wanted to make for a long time. One is a purely original idea that will initially be Android and may find its way to iOS (if iOS supports what I want to do). It’s a utility app that focuses around app notifications. The other two are small apps that nearly every developer has built already, but I’m never happy with so I’ll end up making my own, weather you like it or not. It’s definitely something to do.

It wasn’t the easiest decision to make, but I’ve suspended Growlr in the webOS App Catalog. Untappd is on API version 4 now and Growlr ran on version 2, and as a result, no longer works. Additionally, since the Untappd mobile site still functions well in the web browser (enough, anyway) there’s an alternative. 

The app is written in Mojo, not Enyo, and the demand for it is low, so I will not be updating it.

However! Growlr is open source! Feel free to fork it and update it if you’d like!