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That’s a great day for us! Finally, we have released the new exciting version of BlogBridge, bridging the gap between feed aggregators and OPML feeds lists publishers.

Although, it’s in its weekly build state, which means that some glitches still may be there, the Reading List support is already somewhat terrific. Our early testers already reported about their renewed experience since this feature made its way into their workflows. Just to remind, the Reading List is someone’s list of feeds. We can say, the list of preferences that person wishes to share. Before now, people had to use static Import feature for loading these lists into their readers. Today BlogBridge offers you to dynamically monitor the changes in external lists and update your subscriptions automatically in addtion to traditional importing means. You can find the management pane in the Guide Properties or Create Guide dialog boxes.

Next, a really big heap of work has been done in order to make Synchronization functionality more intuitive and approachable. These days we offer cross-workstation synchronization of subscription lists (guides and feeds) as well as the read state of articles and lots of other attributes. Our previous attempts unveiled tons of weak places and numerious issues we made our best to address in this release. Again, we don’t expect the current state to be final. Quite opposite, we encourage everyone to share their feelings and ideas on improving this area with us. All in all, it’s your convenience on the bet. You are always welcome!

Another big change is a significant improvement of keywords and SmartFeeds criteria syntax. So far it was extremely simple and I would even say oversimplified. This deployment brings an updated experience, giving unbelievable flexibility through use of various wildcards. The best trick is that all your previous criteria and lists of keywords will continue to work smoothly but, having new power tools under your fingertips, you are free to unleash it and enhance your hits immensely. The summary of syntax will be published on the main product site promptly and I don’t like to duplicate it here.

Final major change is an addition of detection of duplicate subscriptions. Finally, we added an initial alert box telling you that there’s another feed with the same URL present. The alert appears as soon as the application finds the connection between some feeds in your list and it may take from seconds to minutes (depending on the speed of your Internet connection) or happen immediately if you specify a feed URL instead of some site URL, which requires additional resolution. The counterpart of the feature is added to Cleanup Wizard in order to help you detect and remove duplicates. When you check “Duplicates” box in the dialog box, the wizard displays all feeds in duplicates groups, which means that you have to uncheck those you wish to leave before the final “OK” hit.

Well, too much news, no? Of course, it’s better to try once than to hear times. Go, try it and let us know how it works for you!

And, yes, the official announcement with a more detailed list of changes can be found at the product site.

Here’s another time-killer for your consideration - Bubblewrap.

Personally, I’m not addicted to this kind of entertainment, but I know several companies where the job stopped for couple of days, thanks to flying penguins. Let me know if you need a link.

Some of you may know Gnome Evolution project which is a complete Outlook-like solution for Linux with contacts, calendars, mail client and god knows what else. I kind of like it as it has some indexing features allowing me to search through the years of letters in a reasonable time. It basically performs well, but recently I found that it started to slow down.

It wasn’t until my mail base grew big enough having about 10K messages at a present. Pretty good and solid number, no? Unfortunately, Evolution engine doesn’t think so. Hardly had we got over 7-8K when it became really slow clearing and re-indexing things after the mail box checks. It took seconds to complete a simple check and it hung for a while, doing some “expunging” as they say.

I had a plan X. I wished to backup whole mail base, then remove all the mail older than a month manually and continue with a nearly blank lists. It should unload Evolution allowing it to do quicker, that’s obvious. The execution of the plan didn’t even started. Where I stuck was a clear understanding of that I wouldn’t be able to look through my past email in the backup. For me it’s dead necessary to have a chance to pick letters from the past.

I did several attempts to find an utility application which would allow me to do scans through backups and display letters, but I couldn’t find any.

Do you know any of them? Or maybe there’s a better recipe?

Two days ago one good friend of mine showed me a link to another rendition of the famous ID’s Quake 2 — Jake2. What makes this reproduction stand out of a crowd is that it’s rewritten entirely in Java. An exciting side is that its last version is very close to the original in terms of performance. You can find their benchmarking reports amusing to look at. And now some spectacular moments…

Nowdays there’s a big discussion is open about what is required to be added to the OPML standard and how it should be updated to cover most of today’s needs of feed aggregators, messangers and other OPML consumers and producers of all kinds. The community is actively discussing possible applications and required attributes to be added here and there to cover them. That is what I call “a lot of fun” when expressing my point of view on Open Standards.

As you might know, BlogBridge is an active user of OPML. We use it for internal data interchange between the client and the service as well as we have some OPML import functions which are liberal enough to understand even the worst samples of human-made outlines. So, if we do pretty good with all that, what else do we need for the full happiness?

We are always looking for the ways to collaborate. We are constantly improving our services and application functions by adding more and more features other online services provide. For all this come true the strictly-defined and reliable Open Standards are required in order to make the data echange as simple and flexible as reasonable. The whole network could have easily got into a mess and disorder, if everyone have used their own standards and formats for data publishing and exchange. In this worst case we could barely dream about any collaboration and evolution, in broader sense.

There are number of innovations, like Reading and Attention Lists, which are currently in focus and under heavy discussions net-wide. We have a glimmer of hope that even though we and our interests are so different, we still have very good chances to find a compromise and design really flexible and simple outline format.

Jumping into the discussion, here’s the summary of the OPML format we use in BlogBridge.

Let us and other know what you think! It’s the right time.

Yesterday we started the number of forums to help our users share their thoughts and worries with others. It’s exciting to see how people reacted to this innovation. We got our first ten users in a blink of an eye and most of them have been really active since the very first moments.

Another interesting tool we made public recently is our bug tracker software we used internally. From now on you can report anything you like by simply typing it into the simple form. It’s convenient both for you and us to have it done this way. So, enjoy!

Don’t hesitate to use either forum or bug tracket to share your thought and suggestions with us. We are always trying to be as responsive as possible.

Those of us who are into graphics design sometimes complain about the complexity of graphics packages they use. While giants, like Adobe Photoshop and Corel PhotoPaint provide enormous selection of tools and features, for some applications they are definite overkill. And that’s exactly why some of my friends look for alternatives. Here’s one of them for your consideration and, I guess, it is good one for those who think on a pixel level. Take a quick look…

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Couple of minutes ago I discovered the game — SpecForce — which has an absolutely spectacular look. At a first glance, there’s nothing really innovative about it and it looks exactly like any other 3D shooter out there, but on the second thought I realized that it had some uniqueness. The seed which has grabbed my attention and forced me to go to the official site and wander around for a while.

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It’s not a secret to anyone that Mac OS X has a wonderful feature — Spotlight — which greatly helps to simplify your daily life by providing surprisingly fast search facility. It helps to find almost anything in your Mac without diving deeply into the folders hierarchy. Yeah, everyone knows about it, but what was really exciting for me to discover is a way you can tell it what kind of stuff you are looking for.

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The other day I made a test-drive of another E-mail client written in Java — Columba 1.0. At a glance, it appeared very friendly and well-though out, but soon… Here come my (unpleasant) notes, so if you a fan, you can skip the rest of the post as it won’t add any confidence and make you proud of the product.

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