Then came iPhones, smartphones, tablets and smart watches. All relying on a 3G or 4G signal and constantly connected to the internet. People stopped syncing content to their devices and started relying on mobile connectivity. For many reasons, this was the prefered business model for all hardware and software vendors. It meant services like Spotify could rent music to you without ownership ever being offered. People could stream from Netflix and Amazon prime without ever owning their content. The media software companies had a lucrative never-ending revenue stream and the mobile network vendors had endless data usage to keep them in cash. Nirvana for those who would rather lease content than own it.

Having been born in the early eighties & being interested in tech since the ZX spectrum, I’ve always approached things differently. I prefer ownership, I really dislike streaming anywhere other than on a solid broadband connection, I like to have content which is available offline. I travel a lot, I like my MP3’s to be stored on my iPod, my ebooks stored on my kindle and my laptop to be stuffed with movies that are available offline. I like ownership of my content. No chance of changing terms and conditions, and access anywhere on the planet regardless of connectivity.

So we bring it back to RSS. With my web content I’d moved more towards the Spotify model. I would visit websites as & when I remembered, but I’d only have access to that content while online, so often I failed to even check websites from one month to the next. I forgot about many of the gems I used to read daily with RSS. The blog posts I’d read on my XDA or my Palm IIIc while traveling (because the wider internet & social media weren’t available on the go, so I’d actually read real in-depth content). I had become a 140 character junkie, only ever reading a synopsis or an extract. I became aware of a lot of subjects but an expert in non of them. It was time to find a new RSS reader & start reading full length content again.

I searched high & low for a decent RSS reader & I finally settled on Reeder for OSX and OS Sierra. I also have the same app for my iPhone, but I’ll review that separately. Reeder is a fully featured RSS reader. It can show standard RSS feeds, but it can also download full articles, even when the RSS feed is extract only. I guess it does this by visiting the websites canonical link and downloading the full article. Reeder displays your RSS feeds much like an email client. You get all of your post titles/headlines in the left pane and you get the article text in the right pane.

The advantage of an RSS reader like Reeder is that it strips out formatting and presents text in an easy to read format, complete with pictures. It does strip out adverts from content which can be a plus, especially when saving bandwidth & from a privacy standpoint.

With regards features, one of the features I most use is the integration with Feedly. To save me setting up my RSS feeds on every machine I use, I setup a free feedly account and added all of my RSS feeds to the one account. Then, using your feedly credentials in Reeder, you can sync your feedly account and view all of your RSS feeds in the reeder app. Reeder downloads all of your RSS articles for offline viewing & can be set to sync at intervals of your choice. Articles can be set to disappear when read, enabling you to concentrate on fresh content. The built-in mercury reader is ideal for displaying richer full text articles & the reading themes, much like you get in an e-book app or within a reading extension like reader view in Firefox allow you to set the page and text colour and adjust font size and style for easier reading. I find a larger font on a black background allows me to read a lot of content without fatigue. I do like the formatting controls available.

The benefit of RSS is that I don’t have to remember to check websites for new articles. The content is aggregated, sorted and formatted for me to read. I rarely miss an important story in my field now & I’m generally more informed than I have been for years. I always relied on RSS during my university studies to stay current and at the bleeding edge. I’m disappointed that I let this habit of reading RSS be replaced by individual apps and a generally bloated reading experience & would recommend RSS to anyone wanting to regain control of their informative content.

Reeder has a ton of features which I’ve probably not even come across yet. My favourite so far is the Mercury reader. If an RSS feed is just a post extract, asking you to click to read more, simply pressing the G key on your keyboard will fetch the full text from the website & format it in seconds, without the need to visit the website.

Reeder also has extensive sharing features, so if you are an influencer or expert on social media, it’s a great way to find & share relevant articles with your peers. Sharing to services such as Evernote, Twitter, Facebook and Buffer are baked right into the application and allow you to share an article in seconds. Great for growing your online reputation as an influencer.

Reeder supports a lot of RSS feed services such as Feedly, Feedbin, feed wrangler and Feed HQ, and also allows integration into services such as Instapaper for read later functionality. If you prefer to manage your RSS feeds yourself, either for privacy or maybe you only use a single device, than you can add any RSS feed locally without the need for third-party support.

Overall, Reeder has completely changed my information retrieval habits. It’s a flashback to 10 years ago for me as I’ve strayed more and more into individual apps for news and neglected a lot of the awesome blogs & news sites I used to frequently read through RSS.

If you are new to RSS I highly recommend you check it out. The modern web can mean we are bombarded with information. Information overload can lead to people switching off completely from website content and just sticking to their social feeds, but I guarantee if you find bloggers & websites who write about subjects you are passionate about, you will benefit greatly from reading full text articles over tweets and snippets.

Reeder is the perfect choice for those already interest in RSS or those wanting to streamline their information consumption. Offline availability is vital to me. My feeds may provide 1000 articles a day, 100 of which I may read. Now that I can get them offline I can read them on the go. I can remain offline and read without distractions, I can catch up on them on the plane or train. If I’m delayed in an airport, I can read offline content rather than paying for overpriced wi-fi to access sub par apps and tweets.

Please do check out this app. It is a premium product for Mac OS and does carry a £9.99 price tag in the apple app store for Mac OS, but it’s a worthy investment and will radically change how you consume information.

Remember, you can always subscribe to this site via RSS, might be your first subscription

Now some pictures of Reeder in use.

This hissing & buzzing of the external iMac speakers was driving me mad. A few years ago I remember a fix called Antipop which was a small Daemon which would play a system narration consisting of no actual sound, but enough to keep the sound driver from sleeping.

Antipop has not been updated for years & didn’t seem to work with El Capitan & Sierra, so I decided to make a quick fix using the same kind of empty narration speech and Sierra Launch Control. This fix will persist after sleeping the system & also after a reboot. On my system it has eradicated the annoying pop of the driver going to sleep & also stopped the speakers buzzing by maintaining power through the aux cable and my externally powered & amplified speakers.

1. Open Terminal and use nano to create our plist file for launchctl using the following terminal command:

   sudo nano /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.antipop.plist
   

2. Paste the following text into terminal (nano) using ctrl + v

   <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
   <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd“>
   <plist version=”1.0”>
   <dict>
   <key>Label</key>
   <string>com.antipop</string>
   <key>KeepAlive</key>
   <false/>
   <key>RunAtLoad</key>
   <true/>
   <key>ProgramArguments</key>
   <array>
   <string>/bin/bash</string>
   <string>-c</string>
   <string>while true; do say ‘ ‘; sleep 10; done</string>
   </array>
   </dict>
   </plist>

3. Press ctrl + o to save the file and hit enter to confirm.
4. Exit nano with ctrl + x
5. To start the plist and set it as a persistent service use the following command in terminal

   sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.antipop.plist

Those few simple steps will give you a pop around 10 seconds after running the last terminal command, after that you should find that your external speakers no longer pop & because the driver won’t go to sleep you wont get the buzzing & hissing on your external monitor speakers.

I hope this helps, please do let me know how you get on. This was put together using research from around the internet & by looking into how antipop used to work.

If you want to revert the changes you made, simply unload the plist from launchctl using the following command in terminal:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.antipop.plist

I’ve tried all new versions of OSX on this machine and the last fast version to work is OSX Mountain Lion. I cannot replace a machine due to bloaty software and I in particular hate it when an OS gets bloaty. OS’s should be light & fast and allow each user to customise the system with software based on their needs. I don’t like all the new & faddy features to be baked into the OS. It’s harder to tweak and generally performs badly.

Chrome recently ended support for 10.7 so I switched to using Firefox solely on this machine. It would now appear that Mozilla have brought forward ending support for older versions of OSX and in turn ended support for people wanting to run older hardware.

I run older hardware because ethically I can’t justify replacing a perfectly serviceable machine. I don’t like planned or forced obsolescence. It feels like Apple are forcing people’s hands more and more with bloated ios updates and slow software. The hardware is still fine but the software cripples it.

I’m disappointed that Mozilla would also end support, especially as the open source community is made up of a lot of people with lower spec hardware, especially in the developing world. I refuse to update working hardware with software which will make it slow & useless. As an example, I currently have Dreamweaver, Firefox with 12 tabs, Mac Mail, iTunes, Illustrator, Photoshop & trillian running on my machine, with plenty of power to spare.

If you have hit this snag with Firefox you can opt for the Extended support release to buy some time, or start looking for another browser. Many open source projects are based on Firefox so it might be time to look into those. I use various firefox derivatives on my Trisquel Linux machine so I’ll start to investigate this further.

If anyone from Mozilla reads this, I would love it if you could extend support for older versions of OSX. I’m pretty sure you will get lots of requests for this & many more people will just run out of date & insecure browsers.

Really disappointing.

The three big announcements this year where iOS 9, OSX El Capitan and Watch OS – With a little extra bit at the end for Apple Music & Beats 1 radio. All exciting things & a lot to get your head around.

The thing I’m most excited about is OSX El Capitan. Whilst the name won’t be to everyone’s liking the underlying improvements should be. Improving the architecture of the OS and utilising Metal to boost core graphics and core animation by almost 50%, not to mention improving efficiency by providing low overhead access to the GPU should be of great benefit to OSX users. This is achieved by shifting more processing over to the GPU without the overhead for faster processing and a snappier feel. The demo that Epic gave of the upcoming title Fortnite ran crisp & smooth on the test hardware. Also with Swift now going open source I expect to see a lot more development using swift & with more integration of swift into El Capitan we should see some great stuff from developers.

I will be really interested to see if Metal and other improvements will run on older hardware. I’m still using an early 2009 iMac as my main development machine which is still more than capable and as yet not worth the upgrade. We do have a newer Macbook pro but I will be over the moon if this runs well on our older hardware too. I had to revert back to Mountain Lion on the main machine as Yosemite was very buggy & full of memory leaks. It ran at an acceptable speed but nowhere near as fast as ML. From the App Store reviews it seems a lot of people have had issues with Yosemite so I reverted back to ML until such a time that stability is improved.

iOS 9 was also announced at WWDC and some of the new features do look great. Most notably the new News app looks like a game changer. It’s essentially a proprietary RSS aggregator using apples own mark-up but the articles and formatting did look great on the demo. I wonder how it will work now more & more news content is going behind a pay wall? I tend to use the BBC app on iOS for my news and Feedly for all of my other RSS feeds but in the days of twitter I tend to follow the major sources of news such as Cnet, The Verge, The Register etc and read their articles as & when they tweet a link. With tweetbot this works great as I can view them in reader view. If news works as suggested & the news outlets do adopt the platform it will be amazing, if they decide not to support News it may just add to the already fragmented news/article reading experience.

Also in iOS 9 apple announced new multi tasking & keyboard functions along with split screen multi tasking. Granted the Split Screen will only work on Apple’s flagship iPad Air 2 but for future generations it’s the right direction to go for tablets. The new keyboard functions including using two fingers to create a trackpad with cursor have been a long time coming. How often are you trying to edit text in iOS, it magnifies where it thinks you want the cursor to be then starts jumping all over the place. Not Cool.

The new multi tasking does look great & should help people be even more productive with a tablet. As an old school techie I would never be without a desktop computer *shivers*, however many people now only have a smart phone or tablet for all of their computing tasks so the more capable these machines are the better for everyone who designs or develops apps & websites. The more people we have actively online the greater potential we have to achieve great things with our work.

Also announced for iOS 9 are new Maps which include better walking & transit maps. Granted these will only support major cities so the majority of people will never benefit from this, however it should be a good improvement when visiting unfamiliar cities, especially by integrating mass transit into maps itself. It will give you detailed instructions including transit times and numbers along with detailed internal maps of stations. I’m a bit of a mass transit geek so don’t often struggle with figuring out subways and trains, however for many people this is a hugely daunting task so can only be a good thing.

Finally apple announced a more energy-efficient iOS 9, with an estimated 1 hour extra of battery life under general usage & a new low energy mode to conserve upto an additional 3 hours of battery time. That’s got to be a good thing as smart phones become more and more etched into our lives. A few other things were announced for iOS 9 but I’m just covering the things that got me excited.

With regards Watch OS I’m not really that excited. The Apple Watch is a great device, I’ve played with them & love them, however I just don’t have a need for one yet. I may in the future pick one up but right now it’s just not something I want or need. The fact that apps will run natively in Watch OS 2 is great for developers. I’m sure developers will come up with uses for the apple watch that apple never even dreamed of. I’m just not prepared to be an early adopter on this so not much to say on Watch OS.

Just as we all thought the WWDC keynote was over we heard Tim Cook mention we have something else to talk about. I for one was preying it was an Apple TV update but alas it was something completely different. Apple Music & Beats 1 was announced. As always when apple bring in musicians to talk to a room of developers it all gets a little awkward and weird. Almost like they have had the worst actor in the building quickly learn a script that goes totally wrong. I was happy to see Trent Reznor talking about Apple Music & his involvement and the service does look good. I’ll be happy to get my 3 month trial on the 30th June when iOS 8.4 comes out.

Apple Music is essentially all the best bits of Spotify, myspace of old, twitter, instagram, facebook and music news websites all rolled into one. With connect you can follow your favourite artists, see latest releases & checkout stuff they are working on & generally connect more with your favourite artists. This has been a long time coming. Since the shift from physical media to MP3/AAC/Streaming storage & acquisition of music has become far easier, but the social aspects of music & music discovery have faltered. I used to love going to a record shop(s) and browsing the racks, seeing new releases, chatting with like-minded people & hearing new music in store. I loved swapping CD’s with friends & discovering new bands. In the age of iTunes & streaming this has all but disappeared. I’m hoping that the new connect service goes some way to bridging that gap & hopefully artists will promote music they love & not just self promote. The new discovery tools are apparently user curated & not algorithm led so hopefully the suggestions will be just as good as those made by your mates/peers back in the CD/Tape/Vinyl days.

Alongside the Apple Music subscription service they announced beats 1 radio. Broadcasting out of London, NYC & LA it’s meant to be a 24 hour global radio station. I hope that they bring some more countries into the mix as broadcasting from two US locations & London hardly seems representative of the world. I’m glad to see they brought in Zane Lowe. I didn’t like a lot of his Radio 1 stuff but that’s simply because I don’t rate mainstream chart music, however in his early MTV days & in his own music taste this guy does know what he is talking about. It may finally shake up the old chart system & broadcast radio nonsense & finally expose some new genuine talent.

So that’s my quick recap of WWDC 2015. I hope I managed to express what parts of WWDC I most enjoyed. Did you guys watch? What in particular are you looking forward to?

My iMac is a mid 2009 model iMac with the 2.93ghz core 2 duo processor, 4GB of ram and a nvidia GT120 dedicated graphics card. I thought this would be plenty to run Mw3 in low graphics settings, but I was so surprised to see it run at high graphic details with 2x anti aliasing enabled and sustain a minimum of 30fps on really detailed open maps. When in buildings where less scenery is visible its possible to hit 60 or 70fps. Bearing in mind this is with everything set to high so the graphics look great, and 30fps is perfectly playable & fast. If you want an even faster gaming experience you can reduce the graphics quality. This is also running at the iMacs native resolution of 1920×1200 resolution.

The first step was to run the boot camp assistant in utilities and download the latest boot camp drivers. I saved it to a memory stick for installation later in windows. The next step was to partition the hard drive. I decided to set aside 100GB for windows as I’ve got MW3, BF3 and elder scrolls skyrim to play on the pc (until the Xbox is fixed).

Once partitioned I rebooted with my windows 7 ultimate X64 in the SuperDrive. Remote holding the option key on the keyboard and select the windows disc to begin the installer. Work through the installer and when asked to select an installation partition, select your boot camp partition and click format. Once formatted proceed with the installation. Once complete the system will reboot and boot into windows.

Next insert the thumb drive from earlier and install the drivers. The setup failed to boot on windows x64 so I went into the installation folder and into the apple folder to start the installer manually. This will install all the graphics, airport, volume controls and every other driver required, ensuring maximum compatibility.

The final step was to install MW3 and startup the game. At first boot it was running at low graphics settings with no antialiasing. The fps using fraps was around 90fps. Once I cranked everything up this dropped to a very playable 30-40fps average even at such a high resolution. This is a great solution for mac owners, much more favourable than emulation. The performance is superb, especially bearing in mind that my machine is 2 years old. Owners of newer i5, i7 and quad core machines would see even greater performance.

I’m about 60% through the game now, with no slow downs & rock solid reliability. I can’t wait to try skyrim later today.

Here are a few pics of the game running. Apologies for any typos, I’m typing this from the iPad in a car park during a break from Christmas shopping.