Aplicativos

Why do RSS readers look like email clients?

“Why do RSS readers look like email clients?” The question was asked by Terry Godier, first on Mastodon, then in a more detailed post.

Godier dubbed the feeling of coming across hundreds of unread items “phantom obligation”: “The guilt you feel for something no one asked you to do.” This applies to so many things…

In the Mastodon comments, Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire in 2002, explained that his inspiration was Usenet, not email. Usenet, a kind of discussion forum, has been around since 1980 and, yeah, it really resembles an email application.

In the same response, Simmons asks:

The part I don't understand and can't explain is why RSS readers are still following this user interface.

It's not that they don't exist, but they are few and niche.

I remembered feeeed, a free iOS app. It allows you to subscribe to a variety of information sources (including RSS feeds) and displays them in a kind of timeline, with different visuals for each type, no counters, no pressure.

I also came across Stream, which does away with counters and one of the three traditional panels of RSS readers (the feeds panel) to instead deliver a stream of items to read, like a “unified timeline.” Also for iOS, also free.

There are also small initiatives, usually undertaken by a single person and available on the web, that promise a calmer experience when reading RSS feeds. I am familiar with Artemis, FeedCity, and vore.

More examples?

For me, NetNewsWire is the perfect app for macOS. NetNewsWire 7.0, released this Tuesday (27th), reinforces this distinction. The implementation of Liquid Glass is so good that the app looks better (screenshots), without losing its identity. Extra points for the icon-free menus, mitigating one of the silliest problems in macOS 26 Tahoe. Now I’m looking forward to the iOS version.

Markdown in Windows 11 Notepad

My instinctive reaction to the news that Windows 11 Notepad has gotten text formatting support was to reject it outright. What a blasphemy! After reading the article, however, it seemed quite interesting: the formatting is Markdown, you can toggle between formatted and plain text with a click, and most importantly, you can completely disable formatting in the app’s settings.

(This is yet another reason why it’s always good to read beyond the headline. Microsoft’s blog post announcing this feature, for example, doesn’t mention Markdown, which made me expect the worst.)

TextEdit, macOS’s notepad equivalent, offers rich formatting (*.rtf format). It’s horrible. I think I only use it when I open the app for the first time after reinstalling the system or when setting up a new computer. My first move is always to switch the default to plain text in the settings.

That said, I would love for macOS TextEdit to have native Markdown support, even if it were just syntax highlighting — that is, without rendering the formatting.

Back to Windows Notepad, I learned that the version Microsoft has been updating with cool features (Markdown) and questionable ones (Copilot/AI) over the past three years is actually a whole new app. And that the old app — the one that was abandoned by Microsoft for over two decades — remains accessible at C:\windows\system32\notepad.exe. And if the new one is uninstalled, the old one automatically becomes the default. It’s good to have a backup when major changes hit previously reliable software.

(At least that’s what this commenter on Ars Technica says. I don’t have a Windows PC to verify this information.)

Signal has found a brilliant solution to shield its app from Recall, Microsoft’s official spyware for Windows 11: setting the app as protected by copyright (DRM), just like Netflix’s, which prevents it from appearing in screenshots — including those taken by Recall.

Recall, in case you’ve forgotten, is an “AI” feature that Microsoft announced in May 2024 for Copilot+ computers, which takes screenshots every few seconds and creates a searchable archive. Basically spyware. The launch was delayed due to public backlash, but testing resumed in April and it’s expected to arrive on eligible computers soon.

Command Palette is better than the Start menu

Microsoft PowerToys logo.

I understand that tradition and the power of branding carry a lot of weight, which explains the uproar surrounding any change involving the Start menu in Windows.

What I don’t understand is why Microsoft is sidelining a tool that seems so cool, like the Command Palette, the newest addition to PowerToys, a set of (open source!) utilities from Microsoft for Windows. It was released in version 0.90 at the end of March.

The Command Palette is a “launcher,” similar to Spotlight on macOS. Press Win + Alt + Space to invoke it and type what you want. (You can change the keyboard shortcut in the app settings.)

At first glance, it’s not much different from pressing the Win key and typing the name of an app or file. The Command Palette does that too. But it does so much more:

  • Execute commands (using the > command).
  • Switch between open windows.
  • Perform calculations.
  • Access websites or conduct web searches.
  • Run system commands.

Another cool feature is that it is extensible. The Command Palette itself has an “extension creator” based on a form. Those familiar with coding can create with more precision. Not tech-savvy? You can search for and install extensions.

Here on the other side, in macOS, I never use the closest thing Apple offers to the Start menu, the Launchpad. (Or is it the Dock?) I always use Spotlight instead, and unless when I occasionally forget the name of a rarely used app, it’s the fastest way to open any app.

Is my behavior weird, or uncommon? Do people really open the Start menu (or the Launchpad), find the app icon they want, and click it with the mouse?

Anyway, if you’re using Windows: Command Palette. That’s the way to go. Oh, and the app is free.

Pinta 3.0

Pinta's logo: a brush inclined next to a tube of paint.

Pinta 3.0 is out. The new version of the lightweight image editor is built on the GTK 4 and Libadwaita, a much-welcomed modernization of the app.

While this alone brings a host of given improvements to Pinta, it’s not the only new feature. There are visible changes (new icons, menu, color picker, and smart layers) as well as under-the-hood enhancements (dynamic adjustments for different screen sizes and orientations, better gesture support, increased speed, and hopefully fewer crashes).

Support for add-ins, which was temporarily removed in the 2.x series, is back. For now, only two have been ported, but the developers say that “more are likely to be ported to the new release and future releases.”

Pinta’s origins trace back to being a multiplatform Windows’ Paint.NET alternative, meaning it aims to be a simple yet capable image editor; the missing link between Paint and Photoshop. The code is open source and the app is available on Linux, macOS (now with support for Apple Silicon), OpenBSD, and Windows.

Google is right to change Gulf of Mexico’s name in its Maps app in the US

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Google will change the names of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and revert Denali to Mount McKinley in its Maps app, aligning it with one of President Donald Trump’s weird ideas.

Someone dug up a 2008 post from Google’s public policy blog where the then-global director of the sector talks about this very issue — “How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth.”

Google has a uniform policy they call “Primary Local Usage:”

Under this policy, the English Google Earth client displays the primary, common, local name(s) given to a body of water by the sovereign nations that border it. If all bordering countries agree on the name, then the common single name is displayed (e.g. “Caribbean Sea” in English, “Mar Caribe” in Spanish, etc.). But if different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names, with each label placed closer to the country or countries that use it.

In other languages, Google uses the common name in the language that Google Maps/Earth is being displayed in, along with an expandable button that lets you know the name isn’t universally agreed upon and lists other names that are also used.

That’s where people are giving Google a hard time, as they have (or used to have?) a policy that adopted the criteria of “primary, common, local” names for bodies of water:

[…] By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.

On X, the company responded to the criticism by saying they have “a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

In the case of the US, that would be the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). Note that the two changes — the Gulf of Mexico and Denali — haven’t been published by the GNIS yet, so Google Maps is still showing the “old” names there.

I get the frustration with the arbitrary decisions of an erratic president, but this seems like a… non-issue? If the government changes the names of bodies of water, as the US government plans to do (the executive order was published by Trump on January 20th and is pending a GNIS update), Google is right to reflect that in Maps.