Google Reader is a new Google application. It’s an online feed reader. Naturally it understands RSS and Atom and probably some other formats I’m not aware of. It had a problem importing my OPML from Newsgator though. It only imported 5 of my 20 feeds. So I ended adding them one by one.

Google Reader is again a nice example of an AJAX web-application. On the left side you see a list of all new articles. On the right you see the currently selected article. You can scroll through the list of articles by pressing the ‘j’ and ‘k’ keys. Scrolling doesn’t simply mean selecting the next article. The indicator of the current article itself doesn’t move. The list scrolls smoothly below it. That really looks nice.

I don’t understand why ‘j’ is used to scroll to the next and ‘k’ to the previous article, though. For people using languages that are read from left to right - like English and German -, this totally counterintuitive.

Google Reader allows you to tag your feeds. You can then choose to read only the articles for a specific tag. A feed can have more than one tag. Tagging is quite useful. If you don’t have much time to look through all the articles you can choose to only go through the important tags.

Finally there is a possibility to change the look of Palm OS. PalmRevolt is the tool that enables you to do this. Naturally, I started creating a Squareness skin not long after discovering it. Creating skins for PalmRevolt is quite easy though there is no special tool with which it can be done. There are two text files and a bunch of BMP images that need editing.

One added difficulty is that Palm OS only supports 16bit colors and that the colors are displayed quite differently on the Palm screens - shifted more towards blue than on normal pc monitors. So it wasn’t possible to use the Squareness colors in their original form. It was a try and error procedure. Use a color, try it on the Palm, try to find a better shade etc.

But finally I found colors that resemble those on the pc screen quite well. And so I released it.

Despite its name Find and Run Robot is a very nice tool. Conceptually it’s the same as AppRocket, Spotlight on Mac OSX or the original Launchbar. It’s a new way of launching applications.

You bring it up with Alt+Space and start typing. The characters you’re typing appear in a text field and below the text field is a list of current matches. As soon as you see the application you want to start, you navigate to the entry either by pressing the “Cursor down” key or by typing in one of the shortcut numbers shown before each entry.

AppRocket sadly wasn’t updated since Candylabs were gulped by imeem. Find and Run Robot is faster than AppRocket, less buggy (it doesn’t contain any bugs I’m aware of) and has several nice features AppRocket doesn’t have. You can, for example, setup that uninstallers aren’t shown at all or only at the bottom of the matches list.

The tool is under active development and new features are added now and then. It’s what I expected AppRocket to become.

I finally finished reading “The Baroque Cycle” a trilogy by Neall Stephenson consisting of the three books “Quicksilver”, “Confusion” and “The System of the World”. The printed editions of those books together fill more than 2700 pages. It took me 1 1/2 years to read the books, but it was worth reading.

The story takes place in the 16th and 17th century mainly in London, Hanover and Paris, but there are also some parts in other places of the world. It’s a historical trilogy with an emphasis on the development of science in that time. You’ll meet Newton, Leibniz, Huygens and also some made up people. It also touches some other areas that were more or less strongly connected with science in that time. The development of commerce and the game with shareholders also take a big role in these books.

I enjoyed those books very much. I think they are very educative while also being quite gripping. Up to now all books by Neall Stephenson were very good reads. So I’m looking forward to his next book whatever it will be about.