“There’s a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away”, Terry writes in their recent post, and then goes on wondering why most RSS readers look like email clients. NetNewsWire might have been “the first RSS reader to resemble an email app”, but years before, the My Netscape portal was instrumental in creating the assumption that every item should be read. For the first time, regular people could feel the urge a journalist feels when a dispatch comes in from a news agency.
Ever wondered why browsing Spotify felt like work? It’s because most software that deals with structured data, which music is, ends up evolving towards spreadsheets, which are no fun at all. Most software that deals with data streams, meanwhile, ends up evolving towards e-mail clients. The shape of NetNewsWire was no accident – affordances are powerful. “You can’t borrow the layout of an inbox without also borrowing some of its psychology”, as Terry says, and that’s precisely the point.
But then, i don’t think it creates an “obligation” to read each and every item. Journalists don’t read their feeds that religiously, even if they’re nominally paid to do so, and you certainly shouldn’t, because you’re definitely not paid to do so. (I mean, you don’t read every email you get, don’t you?) The goal isn’t to read everything1; it’s to be able to, to build passages to worlds that are a bit different from yours, to hear other voices if and when you want it.
“These are messages from real people who wrote to you and are, in some cases, actively waiting for your response”, Terry adds, like it was a bad thing. But what if it was a good thing? I’ve met wonderful people thanks to the contact link at the bottom of my RSS entries. Being able to reply to an article from your newsreader, shifting from mindless scrolling to active engagement, could be a powerful way to rebuild a grassroots web (and would be the perfect use case for federation).
“You can’t borrow the layout of an inbox without also borrowing some of its psychology” – maybe we should borrow even more?
Apps
Apple Creator Studio. Canva’s Affinity is free, but is limited to graphic design and page layout. Adobe’s Creative Cloud is far more comprehensive, but also far more expensive. Bringing back Final Cut Studio as the subscription-based Apple Creator Studio is a great move. Final Cut, Motion, Compressor, Logic, and Mainstage perfectly complement Affinity’s suite, and while they’re full-on professional apps, they’re more affordable than Adobe’s offering for prosumers and independent creators alike.
Adding Pages, Keynote, Numbers, and Freeform (!) to the bundle has to be one of the most baffling decisions Apple has taken in recent history. Users of Final Cut won’t subscribe because they’ll get Numbers as a bonus, and conversely, users of Pages won’t subscribe because they’ll get Logic as an extra. This is unnecessary “bundle padding” with all the hallmarks of collapsing customer alignment.
If Apple wanted to milk their users for all they’re worth, a new Apple One tier, including the four productivity apps with their new “Content Hub” and generative AI features, would have been more effective. Heck, even an iWork bundle would be better than this mess! I have a feeling they know it – look at how Pages, Keynote, Numbers, and Freeform are haphazardly tacked on Apple Creator Studio’s webpage. It reeks of a last-minute decision pushed by an increasingly timorous marketing department.
I’m far more impressed by their decision to sunset Pixelmator Classic and bring Pixelmator Pro to the iPad. Now that they have a powerful raster and vector editor, all they’re missing is a photography-focussed app to rival Lightroom. Photomator’s not there yet, but it’s close, and it would make for an exciting update to the bundle. Now that would be something for which i’d happily shell out €12 per month!
Music
Wajazz: Japanese Jazz Spectacle Vol. II by Various artists. I’ve been in a wajazz kind of mood lately. At the behest of HMV Record Shop, Universounds, and 180g, Yusuke Ogawa has been doing a stellar job of selecting various examples of what this distinctively Japanese fusion of traditional music with jazz harmonies has to offer. His two-volume compilation is “deep, heavy and beautiful” and shines a light on formerly hard-to-find deep cuts. It’s cliché and dated at times, but it’s also why i absolutely love it.
Videos
“Building a Functional LEGO Typewriter” by Koenkun Bricks. Koenkun Bricks didn’t build a typewriter, he built a Linotype machine (a LEGO-type?). That’s absolutely and delightfully crazy.
- I would go so far as saying that reading is far less important as curating. Choosing what you want to be exposed to, and keep on choosing by deciding to read this article and not this one, is an important skill to have in this world dominated by the passive consumption of “content” suggested by algorithms. ↩︎