brian hefele's untidy space

Two interesting pieces of software lunged onto my Mac this weekend. First and foremost was Notational Velocity, which already happened to be hiding out on my Mac somewhere, long abandoned by myself simply because it had been long abandoned by its developer. The version that was rotting away slowly was still a PPC build, which sluggishly churned away under Rosetta after I set aside the old PowerMac. No updates were in sight, though there were rumors that a Universal Binary build was available if you emailed the dev - I had no such luck.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I was browsing i use this and saw an updated version of the app that I thought was long dead. Universal Binary, BSD license, shiny new website… The app is just as good as I remember it from my PPC days - quick and useful, and built around a solid note-taking paradigm.

The top bar is used for searching notes as well as creating notes. Typing feet will narrow the scope of the note list down to all of my notes that contain the word 'feet.' I could then choose a note from the list, or simply hit enter to create a note named 'feet,' if no such note already existed. This allows you to look for an applicable note, and quickly make one if none already exists. It's strange, it's nonstandard, but it's clever as hell and it really works. An empty search/title bar shows all notes -

So that's install one - a great app that died and apparently came back to life. Now all it needs is a new icon. Install two is a new player - Gruml. Gruml is a decent-looking RSS reader which synchs to Google Reader. I feel like I've been waiting for this to happen for a long time now, stuck in my Fluid instance, just hoping a real Reader client will come along. So far, no luck. NetNewsWire, in its most recent beta releases supports synching with Google Reader rather than the now-dead NewsGator service. This got me excited at first, but without starring and sharing, I was still stuck in Fluid-land.

Gruml supports starring, sharing (with notes!), liking, as well as other expected niceties such as tabbed browsing, decent keyboard navigation, and sharing on a wide variety of social services. It'll even tweet articles with shortened URLs for you. Nice! But what it won't do is run very well. It is in beta stage right now, but feels more like an alpha. It's very slow. Even though the latest release claims to do some precaching of articles, it never really feels like this is happening. It's also very buggy. Clicking to a different feed list will often completely stop working for me. Keyboard shortcuts as well as article selection also simply fail for no apparent reason far too often. Finally, Gruml seems to have trouble synching with Reader on occasion, and a handful of my read articles will all simultaneously pop back to unread. Not good.

Still, I'm glad this is being developed. It may provide some competition to NetNewsWire (already including features that NNW unfortunately lacks), and if the bugs get ironed out it could definitely hold its own ground. Sadly, though, for now I'm stuck using Fluid and pretending that a web app is as good as the real thing.