Ewan's Musings
The day to day ramblings and thoughts of a Scotsman who will soon be leaving England.
The day to day ramblings and thoughts of a Scotsman who will soon be leaving England.
RSS wasn't around when the Psion NetBook was first released. In fact, it wasn't until last month that a dedicated C+ Symbian RSS Reader application was released for Symbian OS under Series 60 (Wildpalm's HeadLine). so how come my netBook's Wi-Fi oddessy is looking at RSS as the next application?
Probably because it illustrates the power of distributed computing, and the use of modern day computers as 'dumb' terminals viewing a web site that does all the hard work for you. A long time ago, that's how everything worked, with a central mainframe and a million VT100 terminals. The intervening years have seen a massive case of Moore's law on the Desktop, but now we're getting back to having simple Linux distros with a decent Web Browser interacting with a central remote server. What goes around...
And this is how RSS on the Psion works. Using the built in Web Browser, pointing said browser to the Bloglines mobile version at http://www.bloglines.com/mobile/ will give me a list of all my subscribed RSS feeds...
I can view each site seperatly, read the summaries, and launch the full article in a new window in Opera 5.14...
You know what this reminds me of? All the futuristic sci-fi "newspapers" that would tailor themselves to your own personal tastes. Sitting at the breakfast table, with my netBook, I can select that top option (marked '51 Subscriptions' in this screenshot), the netBook runs off over the Wi-Fi connection, and I get my daily newspaper, with tech news, sports, the Boing Boing column. And my daily fix of Dilbert.
Look, I know RSS aggregators are old hat to a lot of bloggers, but there's not a lot of us in the world. Heck there's not a lot of bloggers on the web compared to the total number of people on the web, so this is really for everyone else. It's a practical use of technologyl, it works, and it means that while something like Feed Demon is a good windows app, it's remote apps like Bloglines that are genuinly useful.
Who would have thought an entire publishing system for multiple websites over multiple servers using a multitude of MySQL databases would have run on a Psion when they were first concieved? Because that's what Movable Type allows. Here's this post being entered on the netBook...
Distributed Computing, through web browsing, is in my opinion the way forward. It gives you true cross platform capabilities, it allows people to use their favorite computer platform, be it a second hand Mac, a five year old Psion laptop, or the latest Pocket PC device.
And that's a good thing.