Moonwatcher

Browse OPML Files on Your iPhone with iOPML

iPhone-toting OPML nerds of the world (I know there are some of us out there) rejoice! Well, OK, you don't have to rejoice, but you are invited to whip out your precious, navigate on over to iOPML.com, and load your favorite OPML file.

(Shown here is the Top 100 Feeds reading list from Dave Winer's Share Your OPML site.)

Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome.

The New York Times on Your iPhone

I wanted to always have all of the most recent news from the New York Times on my iPhone with the least amount of hassle. At first I thought I'd use nytimesriver, but then I realized that since the iPhone has a pretty slick built-in feed reader, all I needed was one big feed that combined the contents of all of the Times' sections.

After twenty minutes of dragging, dropping, copying, and pasting in Yahoo! Pipes, I had built what I needed: the NY Times Megafeed.

As an extra bonus, the individual feed items link to printer-friendly versions of the full articles, which are much better suited to the small screens of mobile devices.

Subscribe and enjoy!

TeamMarks Comes to iPhone

Using Joe Hewitt's excellent iUI package, yesterday I built an iPhone-friendly interface for TeamMarks, an application I'm almost but not quite ready to launch. (It needs a permissioning system first.) For now, just think of it as del.icio.us for Google Apps but with folders. And permissions. :-)

Developing for iPhone feels a lot like writing Newton applications. You don't get to use the same development environment as the Apple engineers (then it was NewtonScript vs C++, now it's AJAX vs Cocoa), there's no emulator so you're stuck testing on an actual device, and there's no good way to take a screenshot.

I sincerely hope that by the time of the Office 2.0 Conference, Apple will have released the tool that Steve Jobs used during the iPhone debut keynote to mirror the iPhone's display on an external monitor/projector. Otherwise there are going to be some really clunky presentations, mine included.

Update: iPhoney isn't perfect but goes a long way toward addressing the screenshot problem. Cool!

Mountain Morning

Expert Analysis from "Amateur" Journalists

Jason Wood has written an excellent analysis of the upcoming NetSuite IPO. Reading it made me realize something about bloggers, who are often thought of as "amateur journalists". Jason may not be a professional writer, but he is a professional hedge fund manager. Many professional journalists who write about stocks are only amateur financial analysts. So who's the amatuer?

When I read about sports from Mark Cuban, or technology from Tim Bray, or law from John Palfrey, or high-def filmmaking from Mike Curtis, I'm hearing directly from experts in their respective fields—the sources from whom an excellent journalists would get his facts. So if I can go straight to the source, why would I want someone who is a professional writer but an amateur in the subject at hand standing between me and the expert?

I've decided to pare down the number of feeds to which I subscribe by applying the expert source test: if the feed comes from someone who's an expert in his field, the feed stays. If not, the feed goes. I expect to lose quite a few bloggers' feeds—and quite a few professional journalists'.

Initial iPhone Reactions from a Calendar Guy

There are already plenty of iPhone reviews littering the web so the basics are by now well-trod ground. But here are some of the things I as someone who thinks about calendars a lot have noticed:

• No To-Do Items
  Like Google Calendar, iPhone has no to-do list. Strange but true.

  I myself don't use iCal's to-do list, preferring instead to create calendar events that begin on the task's due date, but many people do. (Support for iCal to-do's is one of the most requested features for Spanning Sync.)

• No Support for Multiple Calendars
  The iPhone calendar application doesn't have the notion of multiple calendars like iCal does. When you configure iTunes to sync your Mac with your iPhone, you specify into which iCal calendar new events created on the iPhone should be inserted.

  So if you have multiple iCal calendars—say, for Work and Personal events—you won't be able to create events on your iPhone for those specific calendars. Instead, all events will go into the iCal calendar you selected in iTunes. Which leads me to...

• iTunes Calendar Selection Bug
  If you choose to sync all of your iCal calendars with your iPhone, you aren't able to choose into which calendar new events should be inserted. Instead, the last calendar in your list is always selected. To work around this bug, choose "Selected calendars" and select all of your calendars individually.

The iPhone calendar application feels a bit rushed; I fully expect to see it updated in the near future. Regardless, my iPhone is happily syncing with Google Calendar using Spanning Sync.