Internet Things Archives - Page 10 of 13

Purchasing a video streaming box

December 22, 2024June 26, 2014 by Neil Turner

I’m planning to purchase a video streaming box – i.e. a thing that you plug into your TV to watch streaming video services. Now that we have Netflix I’d like to be able to watch films and TV shows on our TV, without having to run them through my Mac (which is also connected to the TV).

Things I’ve already tried

Last year I bought a Raspberry Pi, and for a while I used that to watch BBC iPlayer, but it’s not a great experience. It’s a bit slow and as I had XBian on a different SD card to everything else I had to shut it down, swap the cards and reboot it. The BBC iPlayer interface in XBMC leaves a lot to be desired, plus I’d been using a smartphone app as a remote which is a bit clunky.

Our Freesat box and Blu-Ray players also technically support BBC iPlayer, and the latter also supports YouTube, but they’re so fiddly and slow that they’re not worth using. In particular the remote control for our Toshiba Blu-Ray player is awful – it’s often unresponsive and the buttons are confusing.

Comparing video streaming boxes

A couple of weeks’ ago Pocket Lint did a good review of several boxes available in the UK. They looked at the Apple TV, Roku, Roku Streaming Stick, Sky Now TV, Google Chromecast, WDTV Play, Amazon Fire TV (not currently available in the UK), plus a couple of less-known Android-based boxes.

As much as I like Apple, the Apple TV is out of the question. It’s one of the most expensive boxes on the market, at £99, and doesn’t support many UK streaming services – iPlayer and 4oD are missing, for example. Though Apple does add new channels from time to time, there’s no schedule and no way of adding custom apps without jailbreaking. Apple really needs to consider creating an app store for the Apple TV if it’s going to be more than a niche product.

I also think that the Google Chromecast is a bit too basic. It’s useless without a smartphone or tablet, but it is cheap. And the WDTV Play, as you’d expect from a company like Western Digital, is more about playing content that you already have on your own hard disks, although Netflix is supported.

Sky’s Now TV box is by far the cheapest at £10, and is basically a re-branded Roku box, but without the ability to (easily) add other apps. Indeed, there’s no Netflix because it competes with Now TV, but it does offer the main British streaming services like iPlayer and 4oD. And Amazon’s Fire TV box is US-only at present.

Rockin’ the Roku

So that basically leaves the Roku devices. They support the largest range of streaming services, including all the big British ones. The only notable omission is Amazon Instant Video, which we don’t subscribe to. And you can easily add extra services with custom apps if needed.

The Roku 3 offers more features, such as both ethernet and wifi (and not just the latter), as well as a remote control that can be used with headphones. But it’s larger and needs its own power supply. The Roku Streaming Stick, though less powerful, can run from a USB port and can be hidden away behind your TV. It’s also significantly cheaper at £50, versus £100 for the Roku 3.

So, it looks like I’ll be buying a Roku Streaming Stick soon. In my opinion it offers the best platform support and the best value for money.

Joining Netflix

December 22, 2024June 24, 2014 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of the Netflix home page when logged in

Christine and I decided to sign up for Netflix last week. I’d been pondering it for a while but we decided that the price (£6 per month) was worth it considering the number of TV shows on offer. Unlike in the US, Netflix in Britain is online streaming only.

We’ve previously had a DVD rental by post subscription – originally with Amazon, which then got taken over by Lovefilm, and is now back in with Amazon again. That was £3 per month but we were barely using it. We were mainly renting films, and whilst we often have a spare half hour or so for a TV show it’s harder to find time on an evening for a film lasting two hours or more.

Amazon’s takeover of Lovefilm also meant that it was a lot easier to cancel. I almost cancelled Lovefilm a couple of years ago, but whilst on the phone I got talked into taking a cheaper package. Now Amazon just let you cancel in a rather nonchalant way online. I get the impression that Amazon see the DVD rental by post part of their business as a niche that it doesn’t have much of a future when compared to streaming.

Of course, Amazon has its own Instant Video service which does the same thing as Netflix, but we decided not to sign up; Netflix is available on more devices, and you can access everything on Netflix at no extra cost. Amazon, on the other hand, charge extra for some premium content.

What we’ve watched on Netflix

So far we’ve only watched a few things – in fact, Christine has watched more than me, mainly because I was out quite a bit last week whilst she was at home, on call. We’ve started watching Heroes together, as I never watched it when it was on, and Christine’s not seen all of the episodes. Considering it was shown in 2006, it already looks dated, with big CRT monitors in the background, non-smartphones and it being filmed in standard definition. Christine has also watched Grimm, and… Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. Yeah. We’ll get around the watching Orange is the New Black as well at some point, as I hear it’s very good – and a Netflix exclusive.

Netflix’s library extends into the few thousands, although there are some interesting omissions. For example, the second Iron Man film is there, but not the first or the third. Such is the weird world of entertainment rights I suppose. Still, you get a lot for £6 a month, and you can dip in and out of series as you please. And there’s no DVDs to return.

So long, Thunderbird

December 23, 2024June 17, 2014 by Neil Turner

It’s with something of a heavy heart that I’ve had to give up using Mozilla Thunderbird for my email altogether. You may recall that I now use Airmail at home, but have been using Thunderbird at work. Sadly, Thunderbird is no longer fit for my purposes and so it’s had to go. I’m now using Outlook 2010, just like (almost) everyone else at work.

The reason for the change has been because of our move to Office 365. We’ve migrated from an old Unix system for email, and a proprietary calendar system called Meeting Maker, which also has various other nicknames not to be repeated in polite company. Meeting Maker was a separate application but the server had a CalDAV servlet which could also produce a subscribe-able internet calendar (.ics) file. And the email system was IMAP-based.

Office 365, however, primarily uses Exchange. IMAP and POP3 are provided for email, but it doesn’t support CalDAV for calendars, or CardDAV for contacts. So whilst Thunderbird would be okay for using just as an email client, I’d still have to go back to Outlook for my calendars – at which point, there’s no reason to carry on using Thunderbird.

‘But wait’, you may be saying, ‘you linked to a Provider for Exchange extension only last month!’. I did, but sadly I couldn’t get it to work, and development on it has ceased in any case. There was no way I was able to get my Office 365 calendars working in Thunderbird’s Lightning extension.

The really sad thing is that I’m not missing Thunderbird as much as I thought I would. Unsurprisingly, Outlook works much better when it’s used with an Exchange email server than a generic IMAP one, and it’s nice to be able to set out of office replies without having to go into webmail. It’s also a lot faster in my experience.

To me, Thunderbird’s problem is that it seems to be falling into a power user niche. It’s too big and complicated for basic users, or even people like me who want a relatively straightforward interface for use at home. But it also lacks enterprise features, like support for Exchange. And I’m surprised that Lightning is still an extension, rather than being offered as part of a bundle, given that Outlook comes as a complete package. It needs some love and attention, but with the Mozilla Foundation’s focus on Firefox and its Firefox OS phones, I can’t see it getting any.

My first BuzzFeed Listicle

September 28, 2024April 29, 2014 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of the 9 Surprising Facts About Sowerby Bridge listicle on BuzzFeed

Last week, whilst coming with ideas for a new blog post, I realised that one of them was essentially a BuzzFeed-style listicle. So, rather than posting it here, I decided to publish it as a community post on BuzzFeed. And so 9 Surprising Facts About Sowerby Bridge was born.

One of the main reasons why I did it was as an experiment, to see what kind of engagement community posts on BuzzFeed get. It’s something of a niche topic – I don’t know how many people would search for it, and I deliberately haven’t shared it on my own social media channels until now. Articles by BuzzFeed’s own journalists often do well with lots of clicks, but I’m under the impression that community posts can be somewhat hit and miss. We’ll see.

All but two of the photos were my own, linked to on Flickr.

In any case, I hope that it serves as an interesting look at my home town of Sowerby Bridge. It’s a town that’s overshadowed by its more famous neighbours of Halifax and Hebden Bridge, but has some of its own claims to fame. We’ve got Britain’s deepest canal lock, for example, and it’s possible to do a circular pub crawl taking in twelve pubs, almost all of which serve decent beer. There’s our annual Rushbearing festival, and we have a pretty good high street. It’s a surprising place and more people should take the time to come and visit, in my opinion.

A letter from me to myself in 1999 about the internet

December 23, 2024March 6, 2014 by Neil Turner

This month marks 15 years since I first used the internet at home. I thought I’d write a letter to myself, aged 14, about how things have changed since then.

Dear Neil,

Hello. This is a letter from 2014, 15 years into the future. Around about now, you will be using the internet at home for the first time, and it will be awesome. What’s more, is that as time goes on, it will get even more awesome, and the ways that you use the internet will change.

Firstly, it’ll get faster. Right now you’re using a 56k modem, and downloading a 10 MB file can take the best part of an hour. But in a couple of years time, you’ll get ‘broadband’, and that’ll increase your download speeds tenfold, to around 512 Kbps. Better yet, it’s ‘always on’, so there’s no need to dial a number and hear the modem make all of those screechy noises, and you’re not charged by the minute, so no more £40 per month phone bills for your parents to pay.

Although you will still hear the screechy modem noises in the future, I’m afraid. You’ll spend a couple of years in university halls of residence with them, and then share an office with a fax machine.

Eventually your internet connection will hit the lofty highs of 20 Mbps – yes, megabits, not kilobits. You’ll be able to use the internet to watch full TV programmes, and you won’t even need to use that ghastly RealPlayer software anymore. Oh yeah, and if you think RealPlayer is bad now then I have bad news for you, but hey, it gets worse before it gets better (i.e. you can get rid of it completely!)

The music industry eventually figures out how to sell music legally online so you won’t be using Napster for much longer. Hurrah! In fact, you don’t really buy CDs anymore. Next year, your parents will buy you a portable MP3 player – a bit like a MiniDisc player – because you’ll do well in your GCSEs. Just not necessarily in the subjects that you expect.

And soon you won’t even need a computer to use the internet. One day, you’ll buy a mobile phone, but with a big touchscreen that also has the internet – and, it works anywhere! In fact in some places it’s faster than the internet on your computer and you’ll be able to sit in a bus station and use the internet at 38 Mbps! Because you’ll still be using buses when you’re almost 30 as you still haven’t passed your driving test yet. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news.

In better news, you will eventually find someone to love, and who loves you back in equal measures. It’ll take a while, but you will get there and you will be happy.

Also, and you may find this utterly bizarre now, but you are writing this letter on Firefox, a descendent of Netscape, running on an Apple Mac. You will, in time, give up your reliance on Windows and Internet Explorer. Oh, and Apple makes your phone too. And a ‘tablet’ – a flat touchscreen device that doesn’t have a keyboard but let you use the internet and programs, and watch videos, which is pretty cool.

I’m sorry to say that all of the time you spent learning to code in BASIC turns out to be for little value. You’ll end up knowing the very basics of several languages, but nothing substantial, sadly.

So anyway, on the whole the future is pretty awesome. See you in 15 years!

Yours,

Neil

Kickstarted: reviewing the projects I’ve backed on Kickstarter

December 23, 2024January 19, 2014 by Neil Turner

Screenshot of my Backer History page on Kickstarter

Over the past two years, I’ve backed 12 projects on Kickstarter. All 12 have reached their funding goals, and I’ve paid out approximately £40 in pledges in total.

Some of those projects have now produced the products that they were raising money for, so I’ve decided to look back at each one, over the next few months. I’ll be writing about why I backed the project, and what I got out of it.

I’ll post the first entry next Sunday, and then a new one every Sunday until I’ve reviewed all of the projects I’ve backed. Obviously, if I back any additional projects in the next three months, I’ll tag those on the end too.

BT Home Hub 4 Review

December 23, 2024July 18, 2013 by Neil Turner

I’ve got my hands on a brand new BT Home Hub 4. This is the latest update to BT’s own-brand wireless router that it provides to its broadband customers. We’ve been with BT broadband since we moved to Sowerby Bridge in November 2010, and, apart from one broken promise regarding an activation date for the flat move we’ve had no problems.

During this time we’ve had an older model – the BT Home Hub 2 (model B), which is fine – but this newer model is better. Namely it supports dual-channel Wifi, so as well as using the 2.4 GHz channel, it supports the 5 GHz channel. Devices which can use the 5 GHz channel can therefore run at faster speeds – theoretically 300 Mbps is possible.

Unboxing

I’ve posted a few unboxing photos on Flickr. The most interesting thing about the box is that it is designed to fit through a letterbox – therefore, customers won’t have to wait around for a delivery or have to retrieve packages from their local sorting office a day later. It didn’t fit through our letterbox, but that’s because we live in a flat and ours is tiny – I imagine most people with a proper letterbox will be fine.

Inside the box, the Home Hub is in one compartment, and the cables and manuals are in the other. You get a Cat5e ethernet cable, a modem cable, microfilter, and a USB wifi dongle. The dongle enables dual-band Wifi on computers which may not otherwise have it, although unfortunately it’s only compatible with Windows Vista, 7 and 8. The manuals are brief, and just cover what you need to set it up and some troubleshooting.

BT Home Hub 2 (left) and BT Home Hub 4 (right)

The BT Home Hub 4

Physically the BT Home Hub 4 is quite small – it’s wide, but shorter and thinner than the BT Home Hub 2, on the left in the picture. It also looks nice, which is what you want from a device that is most likely in your front room, and carries on the good design that BT have had in its routers. It’s also very light.

The back of the router has an RJ11 socket for the modem cable, and five RJ45 sockets. One of these supports gigabit ethernet, and three others support standard 100 Mbps 100BaseTX ethernet. The fifth is a WAN socket for BT Infinity customers – unfortunately BT haven’t upgraded our exchange for fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) so we have to use standard ADSL. There’s also a USB port, for which there’s no documentation but apparently you can connect a printer or hard drive to it and it will be shared across the network. And finally, unlike our current model, the BT Home Hub 4 has an on/off switch, so there’s no need to pull the cable out.

On the top, there’s a reset button, and a button to use WPS – Wifi Protected Setup. This allows compatible devices to automatically configure themselves without needing a password, and indeed the USB wifi dongle provided also supports WPS. And there’s a holder for the card with your SSID, default wireless key and admin password, which is handy.

Once everything is plugged in, it’s time to turn it on. There’s a pleasant single light at the front, which initially glows green, then orange whilst starting up, and then blue when it’s ready to go. If there’s a problem, then some red or orange icons appear in the silver strip below. This is different to the BT Home Hub 2 where there were five icons that were illuminated all of the time.

Connecting for the first time

The first page of the setup screen for the BT Home Hub 4.

The first time a device connects, the web browser is redirected to a setup screen. By default, this happens with every new device, although thankfully a mobile-optimised version is available for smartphones. You can turn this off later so that new devices connect straightaway. The main purpose of this is to ask whether you want to install parental control software, as current UK guidelines for ISPs seemingly require.

The admin panel

Logging into the admin panel for the first time gave me an error: ‘Sessions Number – no more than 100 sessions at a time are allowed. Please wait until open sessions expire.‘ Clicking ‘Retry’ or any of the options didn’t make any difference. This problem affects other BT Home Hubs, but thankfully it’s easily solved by doing the usual thing of turning it off, and then turning it back on again.

The admin panel on the BT Home Hub 4 is largely unchanged from previous models. Whilst BT have dramatically redesigned the outside, the admin panel uses the same basic design as before, but with a few more advanced settings to go with the extra features. However, the default settings are pretty good for everyone so there’s no real need to change them. OpenDNS users may be disappointed that it still isn’t possible to change the default DNS servers on the BT Home Hub 4.

Speed

The device reported that it had managed to connect at a very reasonable 23.15 Mbps downstream – faster than the BT Home Hub 2 which managed around 17 Mbps. Upstream speeds are low but this is to be expected on a consumer-grade ADSL connection. We’re fortunate that we live very close to our exchange – we’re only around 200-300 metres away.

And thankfully the actual speeds aren’t far off – here’s a link to my SpeedTest.net result. Essentially 20 Mbps, which is a notable improvement, and not far off the limits of ADSL technology. I also pinged www.google.com 20 times and the average round trip time was 23ms; the longest was 25ms so it’s pretty consistent.

As for Wifi speeds, they seem fine. We have five Wi-fi devices in our flat – my Mac Mini, iPhone 5, iPad, Christine’s Acer laptop and Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone. My iPhone 5 and iPad both support the 5 GHz channel, but the others don’t – which in the case of the Galaxy S3 is a little odd in my opinion. We briefly tried the USB Wifi dongle on Christine’s laptop but it didn’t seem to like it – I may need to do some further investigations. My iPad still had a good signal at the furthest point away from the router in our flat, which is a distance of around 20 metres with several walls in the way.

One minor disappointment, from a geek perspective, is that the BT Home Hub 4 doesn’t appear to support IPv6, either on the home network or on the internet.

Summary

Overall I like the new unit. It’s smaller size is nice, and it looks good. Most importantly, it seems to perform well, with good speeds both on the internet and the home network. New BT Broadband customers will get the BT Home Hub 4 as standard, and existing customers can currently upgrade for £35, plus an extra £9 for the USB Wifi dongle.

My unit was given to me for free by a PR company acting on behalf of BT, in return for writing this review. However, these are my honest opinions, and I would recommend the upgrade if you need faster or more reliable Wifi speeds.

Transitioning away from Google

December 29, 2024April 2, 2013 by Neil Turner

In light of Google’s decision to shut down Google Reader – and yes, I’m still bitter – it’s fair to say that I’ve been re-assessing how much I rely on Google’s services. If Reader can be shut down, then what about their other products?

An article by Ben Brooks called You Can’t Quit, I Dare You, throws down the gauntlet, although it is also inspired by ‘Your favourite Thursday sandwich’ by Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, and this article by Om Malik. Not long after announcing the closure of Reader, Google announced a new note storage service called ‘Google Keep’, and Om’s argument is that he won’t sign up because he doesn’t trust Google to, erm, ‘keep’ the product running long into the future.

I’m starting to agree, even if I dismissed boycotting Google on purely ethical grounds last year. Is it worth looking at alternatives to Google’s products now, just in case Google kills off products that I rely on?

Google Search

Search was Google’s first product, and is still their most used. In February 2013, its market share was just shy of 90% and I am sure that there are many out there that think that Google is the internet, or at least its only gateway.

Geeky types like me know that it isn’t though, and there are alternatives. Yahoo! Search is still pretty ropey by all accounts, even if I can collect Nectar points from using it. Bing is better, and I actually used it for the research for this blog post rather than Google Search. I could probably live with Bing if I decided to kick Google into touch. I can’t see Google ever giving up on search but Bing seems like a good alternative if needed.

Gmail

Gmail launched nine years ago yesterday, and at the time offering 1 gigabyte of storage was so revolutionary that many thought that its April 1st 2004 launch was actually an April Fools joke – at the time Hotmail offered a mere 2 megabytes, or 500 times less.

Now Gmail is not my primary email account, and never has been. I was already using an email address attached to my domain name and that situation remains the same today. That way I can keep my address even when changing hosts.

But I do use Gmail. After all, I need some way of emailing my host when my web site is down. Again, Microsoft would be my main go-to here for an alternative, in the form of Outlook.com which recently replaced Hotmail. As well as offering quite a nice, simple interface, as an early adopter of Outlook.com I was able to blag quite a nice new email address, and have the embarrassing hotmail.com email address I chose aged 16 forward to it. The only annoyance is that Outlook.com doesn’t support IMAP, and only works over Exchange on mobile devices. On my Mac, I have to use POP3 which is a bit rubbish.

Google Chrome

I mentioned that some people think that Google is the internet and I think this is part of the reason why Google Chrome has recently overtaken Mozilla Firefox as the world’s second most popular web browser. That, and it’s fast, extensible and also tends to be bundled with many other programs.

Like Gmail, Chrome is my backup browser on the desktop. I’m still a Firefox user first and foremost but occasionally my over-zealous blocking of adverts, tracking scripts and insistence on using HTTPS as far as possible breaks web sites, so Chrome is my fallback. But, that could easily be replaced with another browser; Safari, Opera, or even Internet Explorer in its more recent incarnations.

On my iPhone, again I use Chrome as my main browser instead of Safari, but could easily go back, or try a different third-party web browser.

Google Calendar

My personal calendars are synchronised via Google, so I would need to find an alternative here. This would probably be Apple’s iCloud, which supports the open CalDAV standard (Google are actually moving away from CalDAV to their own proprietary protocol) and already integrates with my Mac and iPhone. Getting to work with Mozilla Thunderbird, through the Lightning extension, shouldn’t take much more.

The only major loss would be Sunrise, a third-party iOS calendar app that I use which, at present, only supports Google Calendar and Facebook. Until it supports either iCloud or the calendars stored locally on my iPhone, I’d have to go back to using the built-in Calendar app.

Google Contacts

To keep my contacts in sync between home, work and my phone, I use Google Contacts, which also makes them available in Gmail. My Mac and my iPhone both support Google Contact sync out of the box, and there are a couple of extensions – Zindus and Google Contacts – for Thunderbird.

Like with my calendar, iCloud would be the obvious choice here, as it supports the open CardDAV standard. Alas, whilst my Mac and iPhone are catered for, Thunderbird doesn’t support CardDAV. The SoGo Connector extension should enable this, although I’ve had problems with it in the past.

Google Drive

I experimented with Google Drive, mainly to compare it to SkyDrive and Dropbox, but have since stopped using it and have uninstalled the desktop clients. Dropbox suits my needs far better.

Google+

I rarely use Google+, mainly because nothing interesting seems to happen there. The friends that matter to me are all on Facebook and Twitter, and I doubt the 152 people who have circled me will miss me if I delete my account. It’s not like I post there much.

Google Talk

I’d almost forgotten that Google Talk exists. This XMPP-based instant messaging network integrates with Google+ and Gmail to allow you to chat with friends. But I rarely use it. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are better ways of getting hold of me and for voice chat I prefer Skype.

Picasa

Last year I stopped using Picasa and switched to iPhoto – and compared the two. I maybe over-exaggerated Picasa’s potential death in that article as the desktop program has recently had some updates, although these have been primarily bug fixes. Picasa Web Albums is under-used compared to Flickr, which has a recently re-invigorated community.

Google Maps

I do like Google Maps, and I installed Google’s third party Maps app on my iPhone as soon as it came out. That said, I’ve generally found Apple’s Maps on iOS 6 to be okay. Its point of interest database leaves something to be desired (probably because not many people use Yelp in the UK) but its street coverage seems reasonably complete and the address lookup works okay. I also find its vector-based maps a bit faster and smoother than Google’s,

On the desktop Google Maps is currently my favourite choice, but there are also Bing Maps (the successor to Multimap) which includes support for the detailed Ordnance Survey maps, and OpenStreetMap.

Google Earth and Street View

There aren’t really many alternatives here. I don’t really use Google Earth on the desktop though. As for Street View, Google is one of the few companies with the resources to go out and photograph every street in the world. But it’s not something I’d use every day.

YouTube

Here’s where I’d really struggle. Of course I could delete my YouTube account and the two essentially worthless videos that are on my channel, but I wouldn’t be able to stop visiting. Barely a day goes by when I don’t watch at least one YouTube video. I doubt that will change.

Google Reader

I already mentioned that I’m looking into Feedly as my Google Reader alternative. As much as I’d hoped for a reprieve from Google, I doubt that Reader will be still going in July.

Google Authenticator

I use the Google Authenticator app on my iPhone quite a bit to enable two-factor authentication, not just on my Google account, but on Dropbox, app.net and also this blog. I’m not sure what alternatives exist, and this Quora question on the subject is awaiting an answer.

Google Adsense

I don’t pay Google any money for any of the services I’ve listed above. But the inverse is true here, and Google does pay me for the privilege of showing its advertising on my site. That being said, it’s not as much as I used to get so maybe it’s high time for a change, and a quick Bing search found a list of 10 alternatives. I shall have to look into these.

Google Webmaster Tools

If you have a web site, you need to sign up to Google Webmaster Tools. For as long as Google dominates the search engine market, you will need to make sure that it is indexing your site correctly. And its reports showing 404 errors is very useful for diagnosing site problems. Bing Webmaster Tools exists, but it’s not quite as good.

So can I give up Google?

I think that these are all of the Google services I use – and no, I hadn’t realised just how many there were. In all cases there is an alternative, and I may have to investigate some of them. Unfortunately, some are better than others and in a few cases what Google offers is clearly better than elsewhere.

Of course, by moving away from Google I’m mostly taking my data to Microsoft and Apple – from one big corporation to another, and each one isn’t averse to killing off products. Apple discontinued MobileMe last year, and although some features survive in iCloud, others, like iDisk and Keychain Sync were switched off without replacements. And iCloud is known for reliability problems, although the problems cited in that article are in the APIs that third-party developers use and not in its Calendar and Contact sync services. Microsoft also ‘sunsetted’ several of its Windows Live products recently – Windows Live Messenger being the most famous of these.

I am going to try giving up some Google services though (as did this ex-Microsoft blogger). I’ve removed the Google apps from my Mac and iPhone and switched my default search engine to Bing. I’ll share how I get over the next few weeks.

Google Reader alternatives: Comparing Newsblur & Feedly

December 29, 2024March 28, 2013 by Neil Turner

A couple of weeks have passed since Google dropped a bombshell and announced that Google Reader is to be retired. Since then, I’ve been partly hoping for Google to change its mind – which doesn’t seem to be on the cards – and looking into alternatives. The key features that I’ve been looking for in a Google Reader replacement have been:

A web-based interface
An iOS app
Synchronisation of read/unread items between all clients

The two alternatives that I’ve ended up paying the most attention to have been Newsblur and Feedly, and so I’m going to quickly review them both based on a couple of weeks’ usage.

Newsblur

In the immediate aftermath of Google’s announcement, Newsblur took a massive hammering – it was often unreachable or kept throwing errors. It’s settled down now so that it’s usable, so I’ve had a chance to use it properly.

Newsblur certainly has a lot of features, especially for misbehaving sites where the RSS feeds no longer work. And I’m sure it’ll be awesome for power users. But, for people like me… not so much. The interface is quite cluttered and I can’t see myself using many of the extra features. I’ve also tried the ‘preview’ of the next version, available to paying customers (I paid $12 for a year’s premium membership) but it’s not much better.

There is an iOS app which does the basics, but it doesn’t really work offline. This is a problem for me as I often read my feeds on trains, and don’t always have a mobile signal – damn those Victorian engineers and their tunnels.

So, on the whole, I’m not so keen on Newsblur.

Feedly

Feedly is somewhat better, in my opinion. It’s got quite a clean interface, although it defaults to a magazine-style view for each category initially. At first I really didn’t like the web interface, which actually works through a browser extension in Firefox, Chrome and Safari (sorry Internet Explorer and Opera users). You can customise the colours and the way articles are displayed, though.

Today, however, Feedly updated the extensions and it’s now a much more pleasant experience. It still uses Google Reader as a back-end, for now, which means that all of your subscriptions and unread items are synchronised. When Google Reader is switched off, Feedly will switch to its own system, but in the meantime this means the transition is quite easy.

The iOS app is reasonable. It’s attractive, although I imagine it’ll be better on an iPad than my iPhone. Items do seem to be cached for offline reading which is nice, but I did find it a bit slow compared to Reeder, which is what I currently use for Google Reader.

The Old Reader

As a bonus I’ll mention The Old Reader, which is another popular Google Reader alternative, however there’s no mobile apps at present which rules it out.

The demise of Google Reader

December 23, 2024March 14, 2013 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of Google Reader with a shutdown message.

Just before I went to bed last night Google announced it was shutting down Google Reader. To me, this news is devastating – I use Google Reader every day to keep up with feeds from blogs and other web sites, and have done almost since 2006, back when it was still a Google Labs product. Others are equally shocked too.

Whilst I’m still saddened by the news, it’s not to be unexpected I suppose. Little has happened to Google Reader over the past few years; the last major redesign was in October 2011 which controversially removed some features in favour of Google+ sharing. Before then, it had been some time since the product had received any attention. Clearly it’s not been a priority for Google for a number of years.

The closure of Google Reader is part of yet another round of ‘spring cleaning’, where Google shuts down under-used services and features. It’s had a few of these now, but this is the first time it’s really affected me (well, apart from ending Exchange support for Gmail, but at least there were alternatives).

Predictably there are already a number of articles about alternatives, from Lifehacker, Mashable and CNet. Both recommend Feedly so I’ll check that out, especially as it appears to have an easy migration path. I’m primarily looking for a web-based reader which will sync with an iOS app, like Google Reader does now. Interestingly CNet also recommends Google Currents, which I’ve heard some good things about. However, Google Currents is not a very well known service and Google’s announcement that Google Reader was shutting down didn’t mention it, so I’m not sure how long that will be around for either.

TechCrunch reckons that FeedBurner will be the next service that Google kills off, as that too has languished for a long time. And iGoogle, which is Google’s customised start page site, will close soon as well having previously been announced for the chop.

The outcry from this announcement has been pretty big and so it’s possible that Google will re-consider – a petition has already amassed 40,000 signatures in less than a day. However, I doubt it will – Google Reader hasn’t been a priority for some years now. There’s three and a half months to go before the doors finally shut so I’ll use the time to look at the alternatives. Google Reader has, thankfully, always had an export feature and this now works as part of Google Takeout . This allows you to carry over your subscriptions to somewhere else in OPML format, plus all of your shares and notes from before the October 2011 redesign.