When working on any 1.0 release many things can be very difficult to judge, particularly when working on something that hasn’t really been done on the Mac before. There were some free and shareware applications to create RSS feeds on the Mac at the time Feeder was released, but they all just did the job, if that. There are some Windows equivalents, but I don’t have a Windows PC and besides, they wouldn’t help me work out how it should be done on a Mac. I started with a blank canvas, which is good.

Nor did I have time for public beta testing to fish around for feedback; the day I released Feeder 1.0 was only a week or so before I ran out of money completely. It was make or break time for me and the business and I’d already started applying for jobs. My friend Hans was the only person who saw and helped me with earlier builds, because he was the only person I knew who was techie enough to get going without me having to explain everything.

I wanted to release Feeder much sooner but the more I read the spec and tried to translate it into an easy and intuitive interface, the more problems I found. It became quite a challenge to create what I think of as good design: something you don’t think about, something that just works. I eventually worked it all out, realised I needed to go much further than I had ever intended, abandoned living any kind of life and locked myself away for a number of weeks to work on it night and day until it was finished.

RSS is a fairly simple format, but there is a lot of information in an feed. Putting all this on screen results in a mass of confusing fields. Each item in a feed can have up to ten different elements: title, link, author, categories, comments, guid, pubDate, enclosure, source and description, but some of these elements can have many attributes (e.g. enclosure has url, type and length), so you end up with 13 editable fields and need to allow multiple categories, each with 2 fields each.

It had to be broken down – so much information made RSS look more complicated than it really is. It’s a perception thing, it’s why people dread filling in long forms, yet when they actually get around to doing it find half the sections don’t apply to them. Likewise, I believed nobody would need all the features of RSS all of the time but couldn’t omit anything either. Think about it: when I started the design in November 2004 podcasting was just starting to gain momentum; if I had ignored the enclosure element Feeder would have been useless to what would become over half its user base.

With live bookmarks in the likes of Firefox and OmniWeb and – vitally on the Mac – Safari’s RSS support on the way, I foresaw a whole new band of people who would want to use RSS for other reasons: software developers announcing product releases, clubs and associations announcing news, dates and venues; the sort of web sites that don’t use a content management system to generate a feed automatically; the kind of people who run mailing lists to interested, opt-in readers.

More specifically, Hans asked me what I thought the experience level be for the people that used Feeder. I told him I was aiming at the sort of person who might attempt to hand-code a feed themselves but would rather not, like a Dreamweaver user who understands HTML and CSS but would rather the coding of that stuff was taken care for them, but I also wanted novice users to all that stuff to be able to get up and running just as easily. In short, I wanted Feeder to be an RSS creation app for everybody.

I believed the way to achieve this was to reduce complexity and the only way I could see to do that was to rationalize what was displayed on screen. This is where Feeder’s templates came in. Many design applications use templates as a way of getting people started, usually with a layout and some placeholder text. Feeder’s templates would work along similar conceptual lines to determine which fields are shown in the edit windows and set default values for new items in the feed. Check the box next to the field you want to show and enter default values into the fields. By default you would be shown the basics required for a decent-looking generic feed.

Support for templates in Feeder 1.0 was quite limited. You had a default template applied to all new feeds and each feed could be customised after its creation. They solved the problem of reducing what was visible on screen but many people still found them difficult to use.
With Feeder 1.1, I aimed to simplify that by supplying a set of predefined templates that could be applied or customized when a new feed is created or at any point after that, plus people can create their own templates, duplicate or edit the predefined ones and revert them back to the originals if needed. When choosing a predefined or saved template, you just see a simplified version of the Edit Template sheet, but click the Customize button and the sheet expands to show all the options available.

Click here to see a movie of Feeder’s templates in action.

I’m very proud of the templates in Feeder 1.1, I think they are a unique solution to editing items in RSS feeds. They allow the user to focus on what matters and have everything they need at their disposal and keep everything else out of their way.

It’s a week since the release of Feeder 1.1 and so far it’s been surprisingly quiet on the support front considering how many new features there are and how many other things had to change to make the new features possible. A small bug-fix release, 1.1.1 should be out next week – it makes sense to let things settle down before releasing that, since nothing in it is particularly earth-shattering – thankfully!

I want to write about some of the changes in 1.1 and there will be a series of posts on this subject. I’ve neglected the software development side of this blog for a while because it can be hard to talk about what you’re developing when you’re head’s well into it and you’re not entirely sure what will make the final cut.

Two things that didn’t make the final cut were AppleScript support and HTML export / publishing. I’d mentioned that these would likely be in 1.1, but I was working against a fixed deadline and had to do what needed to be done to meet it. It’s not that Feeder itself was running late but that other things got in the way, most notably Tiger, which devoured a lot of my time thanks to KIT not working with some of the final builds.

Anyway, I need to make a special mention for two very special people who ensured that 1.1 made it out in time and with all the features that it has – my best friends Claire and Ade. Without your help, Feeder 1.1 would probably still not be ready or even if I had released it, it would not have been anywhere near as good!. Also, I could not have managed to move home without you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Are you using Tiger yet, and if so what do you think?

Actually, both my Macs are still on Panther at the moment, since I’ve spent all my spare time testing stuff on a pre-release version of Tiger I don’t have time to backup, backup my backups and switch over yet. However, I have been using various builds of Tiger for almost the last year (installed on a Firewire drive) and I think it’s fantastic. I’ve already found plenty of use for Dashboard, played around a-plenty with the updated Mail, Safari, Spotlight, Automator etc and here on Panther I’m missing the new features already.

What I really can’t wait to do is start to move my apps over to Tiger and take advantage of some of the amazingly cool stuff Apple has put there for developers. Over the next few months I think you’re going to see some incredible applications appear for 10.4.

Update: I couldn’t take it any more, I upgraded all my machines (I like the Archive and Install method) and installed Panther on my Firewire drive for compatibility testing – the joys of being a developer.

It’s all been pretty event-free apart from a problem with my iMac not automatically joining the Airport network. The answer, which I found in Apple’s Support Discussions, is here.

I forgot yesterday to mention a few more Feeder appearances in the world of print. In addition to its two mentions in Macworld UK‘s June edition, Feeder will also appear on the CD. It also appears on the CD for the May issue of MacAddict and on the CD of the June issue of Macworld US magazine.

Feeder gets not one but two mentions in the June issue of Macworld UK magazine, out 21st April 2005. The first in the Product News section on page 42, the second in Andy Ihnatko’s opinion piece at the back about using it for Podcasting. Thanks to Gillian Thompson from Macworld for letting me know in advance. 😀

Also Omni Group are now using Feeder for their news feed. Thanks to Scott Maier for making that happen. 😀