Looking for the new Google Reader? You should check out Feedbin

I tested – and reviewed – several apps trying to find the best Google Reader replacement (or shall we say the one that sucks less) and Feedbin is one of the better options. It was launched just a couple of months ago, almost at the same time Google announced the death of Reader. Unlike other services I tried, it’s a paid service for either 2$/month or 20$/year, but that seems like a small amount compared to the time wasted searching a new service and migrating (some) data after Google Reader closes, so hopefully this won’t happen here.

The design is very spartan – and that’s a good thing! – with muted colors and a classical inbox-like layout: the subscription list to the left, the items in the selected feed in the middle and the current article on the right. I would prefer the two-column layout of Google Reader and its clones to have more space for reading the article, but on wide screens that’s not such a big issue. You can also resize the columns when needed. As with Digg’s Reader I would like to see more color in some places, especially to highlight active buttons or options (for example stars should be more prominent for starred articles), but this can be easily fixed either by the developer or by myself with a custom CSS style.

The New York Times: “Instagram Video and the Death of Fantasy”

That’s because Instagram isn’t about reality – it’s about a well-crafted fantasy, a highlights reel of your life that shows off versions of yourself that you want to remember and put on display in a glass case for other people to admire and browse through. It’s why most of the photographs uploaded to Instagram are beautiful and entertaining slices of life and not the tedious time in-between of those moments, when bills get paid, cranky children are put to bed, little spats with friends.

Jenna Wortham

That’s true for photography in general, not only for Instagram. As much as we like to think of photos as impartial reproductions of reality, the truth is life is not a series of static moments, lacking sound, smell or texture, and we cannot go back to relive them the way we can look at a photo again and again. I often find myself looking at old photos and discovering details I overlooked before, stuff I don’t even remember seeing as I pressed the shutter. If someone were to alter the photo, adding or hiding some of these small bits, could I ever know that wasn’t the original? Every photo is an abstraction, at the same time more and less real than our memories, transporting us to a world that never was.

Allen Pike: “iOS 7: Catch me if you can”

iOS 7 was clearly designed to show off what’s possible in 2013. As a side effect, they’ve embraced conventions that will be hard to emulate with commodity hardware or web tech.

The hairlines and flourescent colours are trendy and easy to copy. On the other hand, bringing to life these blurs, animations, and dynamics with HTML and JavaScript isn’t yet possible. You need the latest hardware and the most efficient software to make something feel like this. Further, you need thoughtful APIs so developers can take it to its full potential. In short, the browser vendors have their work cut out for them. Allen Pike

The first comment sais it all: And what exactly is the benefit for the user? If that’s the real reason behind the radical redesign of iOS 7 (or at least one of them), keeping competitors at bay, then what happened to the famous focus on user experience Apple fans always love to brag about?!

Digg Reader has arrived and it’s really… beta!

With only a couple of days to spare until Google Reader shuts down, Digg has finally released their own alternative. Since I was among the people responding to their surveys about how the final product should look like, I got early access this morning. I’ll present some of my initial observations here; a more thorough presentation can be found on TechCrunch.

Digg Reader does a couple of things right, maybe better than the current competition. The design is clean and light, very similar to Google Reader, with lots of breathing space – maybe a little too much. There is a conspicuous white column on the right, but as soon as you move the mouse over there you see the space is reserved for the action buttons, which is much better than clipping article titles and moving things around all the time – the distracting way Feedly does things. The basic actions are found there: digg (like), save (star) – you can optionally configure a read-it-later service as well – and share, although sharing is currently limited to only Facebook and Twitter. If you digg or save a story, the button icon becomes permanent, so you can quickly scan the list and see which items you saved. On the left side of the date there is a smaller column, where Digg displays the popularity of the story with a couple of orange dots (from zero to three). If this Reader gains more users, the indicators should become more and more accurate and help users select popular articles in high-volume feeds. Digg also migrates up to 1000 starred items from Google Reader, which is better than most other services – Feedly only manages 250 from what I remember. I probably have a couple hundreds starred items, so this is an area where Digg clearly wins. But I’m still manually migrating them to delicious just to be sure.

The Globe and Mail: “Humanity takes millions of photos every day. Why are most so forgettable?”

This spring, I was an adjudicator of the 2013 Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival photography competition. This week, my three fellow judges – all professional photographers and curators – and I announced that we couldn’t find a winner, and won’t be awarding a prize for the first time in 18 years. There isn’t even a runner-up. […]

Like Mary Ellen Mark, the renowned New York documentary photographer who has shot everyone from Don Ameche to Lou Reed, Mr. Richards still shoots on black-and-white film. When I’m shooting film, I have a finite number of images, he said. And I really have to think about what I’m shooting. And this is where I think we’re going: People no longer have to think. Ian Brown

Film certainly imposes a kind of discipline on the photographer and forces him to visualize the resulting shot better – since he won’t be able to see it until days or weeks later, after the film is processed. Maybe what was lost in the transition to digital was a form of selection, the ability to say ‘No’ to a particular photo in order to find the better one. Instead people just push the shutter and upload the result without comparing it with others. I know I am myself very guilty of this.

That could actually be an interesting idea for a photo app – if it hasn’t been done already: an app that limits the number of photos you can take on a given day or week, forcing you to learn to choose between them, to focus on better quality instead of more quantity and applying filters.

Binary Bonsai: “On Discipline”

However, when I look at a beta I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it. I get scared. This isn't a matter of 'oh, it's a little glitchy now and then'; these are things that from the looks of it seem simply like poor design decisions. The bottom of the lock screen, with it's three competing drag areas and strange mixed messages is a prime example. Yes, it's easy to fix, but how did it make it this far?

Most importantly, these are things that work really well in iOS 6. Again, we're talking about the best, most sturdy, understandable set of interface patterns ever put together in an OS. And it is that way because of a level of restraint the likes of which most software never gets to see. A level of discipline willing to actually say no to thousands of things for every yes (regrettably rich Corinthian leather wasn't one of them). The new lock screen alone has four gesture-based functions on it now. How is that saying no? Michael Heilemann

Among the many (many, many!) critiques on Apple’s new mobile OS I think this one is the most valid, since it doesn’t focus on the little details, going instead for the underlying bigger issue. I can’t have an informed opinion on this yet, but from what I saw on the Internet so far I’m inclined to stick with iOS 6 for some time, maybe until the first major update to iOS 7. I think I dislike the new lock screen most – and this author has an article on that too.

Harvard Business Review: “The Great Dereliction”

I’d like to advance a simple thesis: today’s leaders are failing on a grand, epic, global, historic scale — at precisely a time when leadership is sorely needed most. They’re failing me, everyone under the age of 35, and everyone worth less than about $50 million. I can excuse leaders who are boring, mean, stingy, greedy, uninteresting, self-obsessed, vacuous, and generally lame. I can even excuse lying, cheating, and stealing. But I can’t excuse the fact that they’ve failed.

If I had five seconds with today’s so-called leaders, I’d simply, firmly, gently say (and I bet you would, too): You’ve failed to provide us opportunity. You’ve failed to provide us security. You’ve failed to provide us liberty. You’ve failed to provide us dignity. You’ve failed to provide us prosperity. So: resign. Quit. Step aside.

Umair Haque

Easier said than done. If the current leaders step down, who will take their place and how do we insure they do a better job than those who left?