Introducing the Feeds in the Cloud

I have been an avid user of Google Reader as I really enjoyed the sharing functions that Google has built into the product. The one thing I did not enjoy about Google Reader, it may seem a small thing to some, was the aesthetic choices of the design time. I find the interface to be downright ugly.

From the Clouds back to the Desktop

So, I began to look for a Desktop Application that would fit the gap, and that is where I found NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire is made by NewsGator. They have a fancy pay version, which I am certain has a couple extra bells and whistles hooked into the app, but the free version is just fine by me. The Ads in the free version are hardly intrusive at all, you might not even really notice them.

There are a couple of really nice features of this news client. One is that you can open the original page of the story in another tab, this keeps you from having several windows of different applications flying around and lets you do what you want to do which is read the news.

The second, it might be first in my book, is the ability in the Preferences to select a different default theme for reading the content; it comes with a nice number of different themes and if you are handy with the CSS you can write your own.

You can save posts to Instapaper, add them to Delicious, or send them to a blogging application. I have even found an AppleScript that let’s you tweet articles; quite handy for sharing. You can even save posts directly to your computer as HTML documents which can be read in any browser.

And back to the Clouds and more…

Those are all good things, but the absolutely most important feature that NetNewsWire has built into it, is it uses the Google Reader framework to sync your feeds. You can determine how frequently it fetches new feeds. Personally, I set mine to get new batches every four hours otherwise all I will do is read news. This synchronization feature is perfect for reading news on your smartphone or on the Google Reader website when at the library or in the Apple store. This will make sure that you get credit for seeing that part of the Internet once and you only have to return if you really liked it.

And to the mobile

NewsGator also makes an iPhone app version of NetNewsWire and it is available in both Free and Premium versions. Having used a large number of RSS apps on my iPhone, this is the first one that has any sort of responsiveness that I expect as well as that special magic that comes with using the Google Reader as a backend.

The layout is nice and clean and the developer has taken special care to write responsiveness into the application that can handle a very large number of feeds and posts, particularly as it seems that some news junkies treat their feedreaders with a heavy hand.

So, you can see that the two applications or the same application on two different platforms provides a continuous user experience as you access the information and data which is flowing through the internet. Using NetNewsWire in this manner, it will not be long before the Internet is part of you.

Have you used NetNewsWire?

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Being a geek, you have the urge to modify everything you own. That’s of course applies to your desktop as well. You saw how your Linux friends can modify their desktop and display information with Conky and you are dying to have the same setting in Mac. If that is the case, then GeekTool is the one you are looking for.

GeekTool is a System Preferences module for Mac OS 10.5. It allows you to display information on your Mac desktop so you can quickly check out the time, your Twitter stream, or any other things without any hassle.

Let’s get our hands dirty, shall we?

To fully utilize GeekTool, you got to have a simple knowledge of shell command. But don’t worry, we will guide you through and make it easy for you.

Download GeekTool here and install it in your Mac.

You should now see the GeekTool entry in your System Preferences.

Adding day, date and time to the desktop

Open GeekTool and drag the shell icon to the desktop.

A blank holder and a configuration window will appear. The holder is where your information will appear. You can drag and move it to the position you desire. The configuration window is where you customize the shell command, font size, color etc.

In the configuration window, add the following command to the Command field.

date '+%H:%M.%S'

The above command will produce a clock that displays time in 24 hour format, minutes and seconds. It is important to note that for this script to be properly effective you have to update it every second, or every minute (naturally you just put 60 in the Refresh Every field) if you do not include the %S portion of the command.

After you have the clock on your desktop, drag another shell script onto the desktop and add the Month by using

date +%B

then drop another one on your desktop and add the command

date +%d

in order to put the number on the desktop. Once you have all these dropped on to the desktop you can start changing the fonts to whatever you desire, making them very personalized in the process.

There are some very interesting ideas of what to do with GeekTool within this flickr tag set.

Adding Twitter stream to your desktop

If you want a twitter stream on your desktop, then the command is

curl -s -u username:password http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss | grep title | sed -e 's/<title>/ /' | sed -e 's/<\/title>/ /',

make certain to substitute your username and password in the appropriate space.

Adding calendar event to desktop

If you are keen to place your iCal event in your desktop, you might want to install the custom build of GeekTool by icalBuddy instead.

1. Download custom build of GeekTool. Install it in your system (replace the old GeekTool if required).

2. Launch GeekTool from System Preferences.

3. Click New from the left bottom pane. Select “Shell” from the right dropdown field.

4. Insert the command:

icalBuddy -sd -ic Work,Home -ec WeekNumbers eventsToday

to show all uncompleted tasks, separated by calendar.

You can also check out the icalBuddy manual page for more information on configuring your iCal events.

Adding Facebook feed to the desktop

This involves a series of steps that I won’t go into detail here. You can check out this flickr page for the full detail.

In a nutshell, you have to

1. Create an Automator action that grabs your Friend’s status feed. You can get this feed URL after you have logged into your Facebook account

2. Using the Automator to extract the text from the RSS feed and formats the text with the title, author, and date. Save the text in a txt file. Also save the Automator as a workflow.

3. In GeekTool, you got to insert two shells, one for the workflow and another to display the text file.
Create a new shell called “Workflow refresh” and paste in the code:

Automator Runner ~/filepath-to-the-workflow-file.workflow

Create another shell called “Facebook” and paste in the code:

head -n 300 ~/filepath-to-facebook-text-file.txt | grep '[a-zA-Z-0-9]'

Adding weather information to the desktop

The final item I’ll contribute now is putting weather on the desktop. This one is another shell script that runs in the command field. Make certain to change the city code to the one yahoo weather provides for your city,

curl --silent "http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p=YOURCITYCODE&u=c" | grep -E '(Current Conditions:|C<BR)' | sed -e 's/Current Conditions://' -e 's/<br \/>//' -e 's/<b>//' -e 's/<\/b>//' -e 's/<BR \/>//' -e 's/<description>//' -e 's/<\/description>//'

Now you can style the results according to the fonts and colors you want in order to make your desktop stand out as a beautified Information Center.

There are plenty of things that you can get GeekTool to display. What we have mentioned here is only few of the many tricks out there. What is your favorite GeekTool tricks? Share it with us in the comments.

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