Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

I’m a chronic beta tester. Literally. I’ve beta tested applications, systems, OS’, online services, etc since I was pre-Bar Mitzvah. My first words were “build number!” Well, not quite, but close. I was raised in a family that is obsessed with new technology. From my parents perspective (mostly my mom), this was pure utilitarian. From my grandparent’s though, it was full on eye-rolling, drooling joy. My grandpa was the first cellular phone retailer in California (1985) and his first foray into electronics involved going to the scrap-heap, buying old TV’s, bringing them to the Bronx apartment living room my mom was raised in, and fixing them for profit. I was at his house yesterday (he’s 73 or so now) and he showed me a new laptop (his 7th computer in the house) and two 400 watt amps to power his whole-house audio system. Yeah, I inherited a bit of that.

Microsoft Beta ID 230421. That’d be me.

As such, I’m a sucker for “new” in terms of applications. I probably try a half a dozen a week, and through that have come to trust my life to a handful of applications, all of which reflect my manner of work, as well as what is consuming my time. Thus on any given day, some of these are used more than over, depending on what the tasks for the day are.

I have been on the Mac platform for almost four years now, and in this amount of time have settled on a manner of working and a system that I think suits me. While I’m constantly trying new applications out, I have mostly stopped migrating from application to application.

The Essentials

NetNewsWire As Merlin said on his nice plug for this series, half of my job is finding the Next Cool New Shit (NCNS) for our company. As such, half my day (and a lot of my evenings) are spent combing through news to find the ellusive link that no one else has seen yet, or a piece of technology that I think needs further investigation. Or even just something funny, cute, cool or interesting.

NetNewsWire therefore is the place I spend most of my time. I have a total of 216 feeds in my OPML. Most are common, some are specialty. The most important to me are delicious raw feeds for a variety of categories. Although my OPML is need of some major pruning, so far it suits me. Often times, I come across a particularly useful blog and it’ll get added as well. NetNewsWire syncs up between all my machines using .mac, and a portion of my OPML (critical news blogs) is also on my PPC-6700. All NetNewsWire’s, on all machines sync up every 30 minutes when I’m at them. My phone is set for every hour.

I probably don’t use all the features NNW has to offer, like Smart Lists. I know that it would save me time if I did this, but the problem is I’m addicted the raw, not the smart. I was raised in newspapers, and when I was manning the photo desk at night, I spent time watching the photos come in, in real time, on the AP Leaf Desk. RSS feeds give me that same thrill (if you call it that). A smart feed, while eliminating some noise from the signal, mitigates my signal from being raw, and I’m always afraid I might miss that one key entry, just like I was always afraid that I’d miss that day’s best photo if I left to you know, go to the bathroom.

The most difficult aspect of my NNW installation is the fact that with the delicious raw, and digg raw feeds, I will comb through an average of 10 to 12 thousand (yes, thousand) entries per day. If I miss a cycle, or go to a meeting, I’m hopelessly behind. At this point, I first mark the digg raw and a few delicious feeds read, as well as some categories that aren’t as critical. Then I’ll go through and first skim delicious raw feeds first, then catch up on the rest. Digg feeds are a pain in the ass because they reuse ID’s for some reason, so entries get marked as read even when they are new.

At the end of the day, I mark everything read at work, and then close NNW. At home, I then open NNW, mark everything read that occured before my commute home (10-20 minutes) and pick up where I left off.

When and if I come across an interesting article, I open it in a browser and leave it running. At the end of my combing, I then will have a bunch of open browsers to go through. Now, I read the articles, see if there is anything interesting. If there is, I use a bookmarklet for Wordpress to post to the running links if I think others might enjoy it, or I post it to delicious for later reading or reference if its just for me.

At the end of the day, I use the RSS feed from my running links to compile an e-mail (New Media Tech News) that I send to everyone in my department at Warners, a few managers for a few bands, some lawyers and a few others in the entertainment industry. Maybe I should make a mailing list? Would people be interested in signing up for it?

All with NetNewsWire isn’t roses though. NNW has a severe problem with parsing its XML feeds that frequently causes massive deadlocking, leading to freezes, CPU eating and ultimately the destruction of all mankind. Well, not that last one, but the first two happen with regularity. NNW doesn’t seemed to be designed for information junkies that also like to use it as a repository for RSS, rather than just aggregating current content. I have it set to keep 30 days of data, so later I can search through it. The problem is, the application is poorly designed for both tasks (archiving and searching). On the NewsGator boards, I posted about this and they said they are working on performance, but realistically downloading and XML parsing should have little if any effect on performance provided they protect their threads from causing each other wait cycles.

So that is my use of NetNewsWire. Out of all my applications, it is the one I spend the most time in. For amusement, here is my OPML file for importing. All 216 feeds. Now, put this in an aggregator, set it to 30 minute reloading and read every single thing that comes in at any moment and you have my day.

Safari and Firefox This isn’t surprising, but I have a manner of working with both too. The reason I use both is that Safari is still (STILL) having pinwheel problems if you have sites that use intensive Javascript and/or cookies. Why Apple can’t do adequate multithreading of Safari is still a mystery to me. While it is much better in 10.4.4, it still causes enough consternation with some sites (like our ticketing system at work), that I have to have Firefox open as well. Plus, having two different cookie stores helps with web development and testing.

Here is the top part of my Safari screen. post to del.icio.us is your standard delicious bookmarklet. populicious and LiveMarks I use to get a quick view of the Zeitgeist of the Interneteratti at any given point. WHM is my server’s admin utility. Traffic is SigAlert.com, which I subscribe to (its needed in LA).

The most interesting part of this are my drop-down menus. I have four of them: News, Daily, Random, WBR and Personal. News is a collection of sites that I either go through one at a time, or open all in tabs and go through a few times a day.

My News sites consist of: CNN.com, Google News, Slashdot.org, Fark.com, MacMinute, Mac News Network, Mac OSX Hints, REM’s official site, BoingBoing.net, MacBytes, CNET, Gizmodo, Defamer, Cool Hunting, Music Industry News Network, Engadget and of course, Memeorandum. I had Newsvine on there, but took it off.

These sites cover both my world and tech news pretty extensively, without a lot of overlap. While I read tons of sites a day, these are sites I like to actually see the pages for, not just the RSS feeds. Something about these makes the pages necessary.

Daily are sites I try to check once a day. They are: k10k, Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms, Rhizome.org, Questionable Content, Aint It Cool News, Television Without Pity, Pink Is the New Blog and Tech Bargains.

These sites are mostly pop-culture sites, or sites that are updated in the morning and only necessitate me checking them once daily. I also put other online communities in here (although the 9rules one isn’t there yet, but will be soon).

Random are for torrent sites right now. I’m not linking to them but mostly what I put in Random are search engines, or index type sites.

WBR of course are sites for Warner Bros Records, usually bookmarking betas for various artists, all grouped by artist. So Madonna has a folder, Green Day, MCR, etc.

Personal is links to family, friends, AdSense, Murmurs, etc.

Tomorrow: Quicksilver, iTunes, iCal/Groupcal/Mail/Address Book (or how I make Exchange work on a Mac), 4Smartphone, Transmit, TextMate, Dreamweaver, Flash, Eclipse and more! So this is part A. I have no clue what I’m getting myself into. Christ.

UPDATE: In regards to NetNewsWire’s performance issues, the developer in the comments indicated a new beta version which fixes the storage problem (its not a parsing issue) will be out soon. “Weeks rather than months.” Thanks Brent!