Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

…now with other peoples’ cars! :-)

Tom Walker has started writing road test reviews of new cars…here’s his first one, on the Mazda RX-8. Complete with the little 1.3 liter 240 hp gem of a motor that also powers the Formula Mazda (I so want one of those…) Nice job, Tom!

Yikes…I hate to see NewsGator getting slammed in an article. I’d like to respond to the “problems” the author, Ryan Singel, found with NewsGator:

It has troubles with sites that use a third party to take care of their feeds (latimes.com, for example, uses NewsIsFree.com for Web syndication). With that kind of feed, you need to click on a link essentially twice.

It doesn’t have any trouble with these sites; NewsGator shows exactly the content that the publisher puts in the feed. If it’s only a headline and/or excerpt, as with the feeds he mentions, that’s all that will be shown.

There is also a NewsGator extension from Graeme Foster called FetchLinks, which will selectively retrieve the linked page into Outlook in situations like this. This can address the underlying inconvenience he’s talking about with these particular feeds.

There also doesn’t seem to be a way to rearrange the feeds, which are displayed alphabetically. Moreover, while grouping feeds into folders is possible, NewsGator cannot show you all the items in a folder or even tell you how many items are in there.

This is how Outlook works. One of the real value-adds of NewsGator is the fact that it works within Outlook, and you don’t need to learn new tools and new ways of working. Folder arrangement and unread counts work exactly as they do with email folders.

And we do of course show unread message counts for folders, as shown here.

Further, using Outlook organizational capabilities such as search folders can make a big difference in the way you use the product. Again, since NewsGator is built into Outlook, it has a huge amount of flexibility. More info on search folders with NewsGator here and here.

NewsGator is useful for those who don’t want another application running. But it’s best only for those who read a handful of news sources and don’t mind clicking multiple times to see a story.

Only useful for those who read a handful of news sources? Hmm…Robert Scoble has said publicly many times that he reads over 1400 weblogs and news sources with NewsGator. I’m not sure what else I can say – 1400 is a lot of feeds, and NewsGator is the tool that makes it possible for him.

By now just about everyone has heard about Channel 9. One of their video feeds is a featured feed inside of NewsGator Media Center Edition.

When development started for our Media Center edition, we picked up some MCE machines for development and testing. But things have been so busy that I never had a chance to watch a “real” video all the way through; we had some short test videos to test our system when a video completed, and I’m sure some folks around here had watched “real” videos, but not me.

So about a week ago, during a rare hour away from my desk, I plopped on the couch and watched a few of the complete Channel 9 videos in NewsGator MCE…and made a couple of observations: