WalkerPad

I just discovered BlogsBridge. Techcrunch had a short write up. This is perhaps one of the best free RSS clients I have played with.

What’s cool?
It’s Java so nice cross platform compatibility.
If you setup a free account your clients will stay synced. Best feature IMO.
There is a bunch of social web 2.0 type stuff but that doesn’t really grab my attention much.

So it’s like using a web client but instead it’s a fast smooth local client. This means you can read your stuff offline too. Not to shabby.

They have some weird things to sort out with fonts though. It is anything but intuitive on how to set override or default fonts and font sizes. Also not sure why anti alias on fonts shows up some times but not others in the prefs on different but similar systems… Fonts also do not look as good as they should (contrasted to IE or Fire Fox). No tabs either. All that aside it’s pretty neat.
Not sure how it’s put together, off hand I would say they need to use the mozila engine or get a newer version of it. That would probable help a ton.

I have been using a combo of RSSBandit that has some weird resource hogging going on, but is a slick client aside from that. As well as newsgator, which is cool but I can’t get syncing for offline viewing without giving them monthly money, not going to happen. I would shell out for a client but never monthly fee’s, I’m so done with the never ending service push.
The number of feeds I reed makes this setup a pain, so maybe blogbridge will help with that. No MCE plug-in client though (something newsgator has), and since they are java I doubt there will be.

Anyone know another solution for universal synced feeds plus ability to read things offline?

Bah, we are all pretty sick. Kaily got Croup some sort of nasty cold/flue/throat/hacking cough thing. Kaily has had a good fever going since Saturday. We hit urgent care saturday (pointless, but safe), and then saw her Dr. today but not much to-do about it. Now Charise and I have low grade fevers… oh and one the cat keeps making nasty sneezing noises. *sigh* It’s just going to be a long week and this is just he ramp up to Charise’s wrist surgery.

Steve from Akimbo was nice enough to stop by again and made a few comments.

In retrospect I have such a weird mix of personal/family news and general tech comments that maybe I should split the blog or something….

Anyway, Steve Mentions that they don’t think the MCE Akimbo interface is ugly. Well ok, ugly is of course relative.
So more specifically my issues are, it’s blurry. The fonts are blurry the edges on pictures and boxes are soft and not well defined. The colors are more washed out (more then MCE). Everything has a weird low contrast, making for zero pop. The fonts being soft is particularly is bad. This makes it pretty hard to read from the couch when contrasted to the standard MCE interface. So, maybe ugly is the wrong term, how about less usable then it should be ?

This is on a 50″ Pany rear projection LCD LC13. This set runs at a native 720P and that is what I have windows outputting. MCE looks very good. HD Tivo shows look incredible. Games look good both at 720p and 800×600.

I was explaining to Charise how the Akimbo system works. Charise and her friends (other moms) have talked at length how they would be willing to pay to get a good quality commercial free kids network (not smoltsy GI Joe, transfer toy selling shows, but Sesame street and what not). I suspect this could be a big thing if done right, you should her the moms go off about this type of thing.

I’m going to have Charise poke at the system. When I described the monthly fee she was emendable. Then added how “a LOT” of the other shows have additional fee’s her reaction was a swift “That is not right”. I love using her as a sanity check, some times I can go a bit around the bend, then wonder if it it’s just me thinking funny things.
So there you go, from a non techi mom a first reaction to the price schema.
Then she asked something I hadn’t really though about. “Could I pay 12 or so dollars and have no fee’s?”. No, but maybe that is something akimbo should think about, I imagine it would be more like $15 though. I bet they could grow a lot more market share if folks didn’t feel nickel and dimed.

Being nickel and dimed irritates people. Paying for access to pay… is not a customer friendly model. The Akimbo folks like to point at the volume of other free stuff they offer but it’s hard to find and well… mostly seems to be crap (certainly with some acceptations). Volume is irrelevant, relevant free content is what matters. Really though if you are paying an access fee to get it, then it’s NOT free in the first place so I sort of object to the way that term is being used, but oh well.

On the HD side, it’s great they are going to be offering something. My question is will it be inside the window of their preview? I doubt I will pay to get a look at what I imagine will be a bunch more pay to play content.
Being wrong about that last part would be a good thing.

HD things I would like to see?
Kids shows, even if just unconverted
Anima
Adult swim (if it ever managed to show up on MCE)
Mmm everything else? I hate standard def :p. Really what I’m looking for here though is an excuse to watch the Akimbo content rather then my sat feed. Give me stuff that is relevant in HD. Stuff that my cable/sat company is still sending in SD and you have a big win.

The subscription feature as available needs some work, I’ll just leave it that. It also seems to mainly be available for pay content (I don’t think I noticed it on any free channels but I didn’t kill myself looking). Tivo like power words maybe? Don’t know but it doesn’t impress.

I use rollup2 so I don’t think my experience has been impacted by not being up to date, something Steve also mentioned was generally needed… Can you even get Akimbo without it?

I realize a lot of this read negative. So, some good things
It is nice and efficient to go hit the web site to setup shows. In fact it’s way better to do this then trying to use the akimbo MCE interface IMO.
Down loads seem pretty snappy, bandwidth is not overly choked (then why the time outs on page access through MCE? Need cluster?)

Fix it:
How about this give pay content a different color box or font so it can be seen at the top level instead of forcing people to drill down and then be annoyed about something that sounded interesting but no way would you shell out for it? A small graphically icon at the top level for mixed channels in the same color font as pay stuff would add identification for mixed bags? It all seems like a no braining. Honestly I can’t help but feel the obscuring of payed vs. not um… already subscription payed (Free) content is being made deliberately blurry, that bugs me.