Here is something new and different. Voice Candy by Potion Factory is a fun and useful audio recorder with a number of tricks up its sleeve.

With Voice Candy you can record your own voice, enhanced with up to 8 different built-in effects, and then use that recording in a number of ways: you can set a reminder, attach it to an email, send it to iTunes and put it on your iPod or just save it to your desktop. You can also extend Voice Candy’s built-in actions with AppleScripts, so the possibilities become endless.

What makes Voice Candy really special is its implementation. It looks amazing, is simple to use and is just dripping in thoughtful touches. Recording can be started and stopped instantly from within any application using a global hot key, reminders can be recurring and Voice Candy can even wake your Mac from sleep to show a reminder.

More than anything, it’s just lots of fun. I know, because I’ve been lucky enough to beta test it for the last few weeks. Go to the Potion Factory website to see for yourself.

Congratulations to Andy and Jin at Potion Factory for such an excellent new release!

Feeder is an RSS editor, not a weblog editor like ecto or MarsEdit. All modern blogs produce their own feeds. However, RSS feeds created by Feeder can compliment a blog in a number of ways and Feeder itself has some tricks for working with other RSS feeds.

Suggested Uses

There are a number of reason why people include separate RSS feeds on their weblog. These are some real world examples:

• Creating different feeds, possibly with slightly modified content for a specific audience. One example is this Tips & Tricks feed.
• Creating a separate podcast feed with iTunes tags that only contains podcasts and not general blog entries. This has the advantage of providing more control over the number of episodes that appear in your podcast feed, enclosures files, etc.
• Syndicating content by creating RSS feeds of interesting articles for friends and family.

Downloading a Weblog Feed

Feeder can read your most recent entries from your blog’s RSS feed. Your weblog must generate RSS 0.9x or 2.0 feeds (as opposed to RSS 1.0 or Atom feeds).

To download your blog’s feed into Feeder:

1. Click on the New Feed button in the toolbar and choose Download Feed.
2. Enter the URL of your blog (e.g. https://reinventedsoftware.com/blog/) you don’t need to enter the full feed URL as Feeder will try to auto-detect the feed.
3. If successful, the feed will now be selected in Feeder’s sidebar.

Copying Items

To use items (individual posts) from your blog feed in another feed you can just drag the item from one feed to the other feed in the sidebar. You can also cut and paste items between feeds.

Reloading a Weblog Feed

After adding and changing new posts on your blog, the feed in Feeder will get out of step. You can quickly get the latest version of your blog’s entries by clicking on the Reload button in the toolbar.

Adding the Feed to Your Blog

You can publish your non-blog feed anywhere you like and put a link on the blog to the Feeder-generated feed, if necessary. How to do this is entirely dependant on the weblog system you are using.

If you are using WordPress 2 you can add an RSS widget to your blog’s sidebar. You can find out more about WordPress widgets here.

Adding Items from an RSS Reader

If you use an RSS reader application that uses the External Weblog Editor Interface, you can send news items to the selected feed in Feeder.

To do that, you need to set Feeder as the Weblog editor in the reader application, and use the reader app’s Post to Weblog (or equivalent) command to send those items to Feeder.

NetNewsWire, NewsFire and NewsLife all support this.

Feeder also supports the RSS clipboard format, which means you can drag and drop or copy and paste news items from a reader application to Feeder.

Thank you to everyone who has told me they find the Feeder Tips & Tricks feed useful. It seems to be going well. Ironic that it’s taken me all this time to realise that a feed for this sort of thing would be a great use of Feeder and RSS!

I have many more tips lined up, but they can take a while to write. I choose the topics based on support feedback or things I think are worth mentioning, so if anyone has any requests please leave a comment here or use the support pages to get in touch. Thanks!

Yesterday I attended the London Podcaster Meetup (aka “Draught and Darts”) for British podcasters and the like to meet Adam Curry and it was good. I got to meet lots of British podcasters I’d heard of and some I hadn’t. I didn’t play any darts though, which is just as well as I would probably have somebody’s eye out.

It was also great to meet Feeder user Don McAllister from ScreenCastsOnline and the EuroMac Podcast. You may recall a post on this blog about him quitting his day job to do podcasting full time by providing premium content to paying subscribers. That seems to be working out so far, which is excellent as he’s pioneering this model of earning a living for his work (as far as I know).

I had already met Adam Curry at the Podcast Expo in California last year, but it was good to be able to talk for longer this time about things that actually concern me. I also met PodShow boss Ron Bloom and we had a very long chat about all sorts of things, including Mac software for podcasters.

Oh, and if you’re ever looking for some independent British music, check out the BURBs site and podcast – Barry himself told me it was very much like John Peel‘s old show, which should be quite something.

I wasn’t sure whether to go to this event, but I’m glad I did. It’s always good to meet podcasters (whether or not they use my software!) and what a great bunch these were. Shame Roger Smalls wasn’t there… or was he? 😉

Here are some tips for editing items in Feeder.

Autocompletion

Feeder can autocomplete from other items in your feed, email addresses from Address Book and so on. You can enable or disable this feature in Feeder’s Editing preferences.

If you don’t want auto-completion on all the time, you can still get an auto-completion list by hitting Option-Esc or F5 after typing some text.

Working with Tags

You can use the Insert HTML menu in the toolbar to insert HTML tags into the description. If text is selected, Feeder surrounds the text in the tag. If no text is selected, Feeder places the cursor between the two tags.

Feeder has keystrokes for some frequently used tags, which you can see in the menu. The keystrokes are fairly standard, such as Command-B for a <b> bold tag.

Editing Images and Links

You can insert the HTML for images and links using the Image and Link buttons in the toolbar, when the cursor is in the Description field at the bottom of the window.

You can also edit existing images and links by selecting the whole tag before clicking the Image or Link buttons.

Feeder also keeps the last 10 recent images and links inserted. Just click on the Recents button next to the URL.

For images, you can use quickly retrieve the dimensions of the image, and constrain the proportions of the image using the action menu next to the height and width. Specifying the image size can help with layout problems that can occur in Safari.

Paste Link

This is a really handy feature. If you have a URL on the clipboard, you can quickly create a link by hitting Command-Shift-K.

Credit: This was actually a feature request by someone who was addicted to this functionality in MarsEdit.