This is to announce the start of a personal project called JConsumer...
As I wrote some time back I am a huge fan of an application called FeedDemon. It is a software which you can use to track RSS feeds, from weblogs or news sites or whatever.
I use it to keep up to date on a number of techie sites and blogs which I read regularly to keep up to date on the latest happenings in the world of software development.
Anyway another interest of mine is the idea of personalised web search which presents information suited to the _idea_ of what you are looking for, not the hard text of what you are looking for. RSS syndication offers a wonderful chance for people to access information on tap from a number of sources via a single interface, giving them what they want to see, not what a search engine thinks they want to see. More refined searching should be possible allowing people to access the information they need more quickly and with less stress.
JConsumer brings these two ideas together.
So yes, JConsumer is _another_ reader of RSS feeds. But what I hope to do is look into allowing it to group and search feeds and individual items in a more flexible way than is presently done in most newsreaders I have tried. One thing I hate about blog readers at the moment is going through several blog entries about the same topic and seeing people just expressing the same idea or discussing the same link with different language. So I hope to build a nice app to make feed reading more pleasurable for myself :o)
Why not take an existing open source reader and build on that? Well I'd like to start from scratch to improve my Swing programming abilities. It's claimed nowadays that Swing is fast _if_ you know how to code it properly, and this is what I hope to learn. Also, I'm a little hesitant about building on other people's code, especially if it's covered by a viral open source license. I may decide to release JConsumer later on, either open or closed source, for people to use and I'd prefer if it was 100% my own code :o)
Will post updates often hopefully.
Such a simple idea yet I haven't seen anyone do this component before (although I haven't searched for it so maybe there are loads around)...
It's a PDF textbox for .Net which allows you to edit a pdf document. That's a very powerful yet simple component. Beautiful.
I don't have .net installed on this machine yet so haven't tested it out so any and all possible disclaimers apply :o)
In other news I figured out what was up with my "About me" page and have fixed it.
I was tempted today to look at online guides for a game I bought recently: Final Fantasy X-2.
It's not that I'm stuck in the game (not yet anyway). But the Final Fantasy games have a lot of hidden bonuses in them which can be easy to miss if you don't talk to the right character at the right time or investigate all the crystals in the second chapter or whatever. I missed some parts of Final Fantasy X because I didn't do the right thing at the right point and later on wasn't able to go back and rectify it without playing the game all the way through from the start again, which I couldn't be bothered doing.
I was wary of reading too many spoilers for the new game. Already I've read enough to know I've missed some crucial secrets already :o(
In my opinion there is a huge difference between spoiling a video game like Final Fantasy and spoiling a television series like Stargate, for example.
Firstly, just reading the details of what happens completely ignores the direction and production values that a movie or tv program will have. In a videogame I don't think these values are so important.
Secondly a lot of the enjoyment of watching a dramatic production (even something like Stargate :o)) is the atmosphere created by the actors and the script and watching actors you like becoming characters you like. This is absent really in a video game, even something like Final Fantasy which does try to be deep.
So while I am a sucker for television programme spoilers I am able to successfully resist too many spoilers for videogames like Final Fantasy!
On a completely unrelated note something appears to be wrong with my "About Me" blog not displaying properly and I'll try to fix that soon.