It is with a sense of disappointment that I draw the curtain on my collection of photos for 2007. There were a few “a-ha” moments during that time, but more overwhelming is the sense that I didn’t do much in pursuit of this art.
A simple look at the numbers says it all – My 2006 collection contains a staggering 294 photos, posted in approximately 230 days, starting in late September ‘06 and ending in May 2007.
My 2007 collection contains an anaemic 58 photos. The kicker? I took 226 days to post that number, a glacial pace of 1.8 photos a week (the daily number is just too pitifully low to talk about).
Now, it is often said that in photography volume is no measure of quality. I could offer that statement to defend the lack of effort I’ve put into my photography.
More practically, I could tell you that in May 2007 I moved from an apartment near the Lower Seletar Reservoir to an apartment right in the concrete heart of Yishun. It is true that the loss of my muse affected me deeply. Not having a ever-changing subject close at hand every day definitely dulls the desire to take out the camera and go hunting.
I could always fall back on the old standby – work was a killer this year. That would be somewhat true as well.
Truth be told, none of those really explains why I have almost no photographic output to speak of. The reality is that I used a mixture of all those reasons to stay within a zone where I felt I had some idea of what the final result would look like.
So, yet more photographs of buildings and shots taken in the dawn hours. I worry that the ability to shoot portraits or just street-shooting has simply withered away under this onslaught.
What then does 2008 hold? A few points are worth talking about:
#1: To establish my geek cred, I will begin by talking about my photographic workflow. For most of 2006 and 2007, I really didn’t have a workflow. Despite access to an extremely powerful photo management software, I spent a lot of time organizing my photos manually. Now that I’ve run of photos to actually go through, I spent some time thinking about how to speed up organizing and editing my photos and came up with a workflow that hopefully is a lot more organized.
First, I decided to switch to Adobe Lightroom – being able to organize my photos and do most of my processing in the same application should help speed up things.
I also spent a fair bit of time looking over how I organize my photos on Flickr and the keywords I set up in Iview. I then split them up into distinct sets of information and will be exclusively organizing my photos this way. Lightroom will take care of where the photos actually live.
#2: In contrast to the constant travelling that characterized 2005, I spent almost the whole of 2006 and 2007 right here in Singapore. Now I like this place a lot, but nothing quite gets the photographic eye working like something new (my Macau trip is proof of that – a fifth of the photos I posted in 2007 came from that 2 day trip). I expect to travelling again in 2008 to a couple of countries and even if it’s just buildings and hotel rooms, hey atleast it’ll be new buildings and hotel rooms
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#3: As much as I love the portability of my current camera and have been amazed by what it can do, there’s a lot missing in it – manual control of aperture and shutter speeds, optical stabilization, better high ISO performance, RAW shooting; the list could go on. I’ve been talking about buying a new camera for years now but if a few things on the personal front come together, maybe this year will be it (and I’ve probably jinxed it by saying that – oh well).
So there you have it – my very short look back on the year that was and an ever shorter look ahead. I would say watch this space, but that would just be cruel and unusual punishment 
I made a brief mention about the feed-reader I’ve settled on in my earlier blog post, but decided to spend a little more time fleshing out my impressions of GreatNews.
By default, GreatNews starts up with a two-pane interface
Each of the folders is called a “Channel” and provides a quick way to see all the articles under that particular Channel:
As you can see, I have 3 feeds in that particular category (from the ever awesome Metafilter). By selecting the category, I can see all the unread items at one go. This is similar to what Google Reader offers today. One small quibble I have right now with this is that when you move away from a category, the items aren’t marked as read. But if you were to move from one feed to another, GreatNews automatically marks that feed as read correctly.
GreatNews offers tabbed browsing, allowing you to quickly open multiple articles in the background while you keep reading. By default though, GreatNews uses the IE rendering engine 
. Firefox cannot be used without installing the Firefox ActiveX plugin (gah!), so I just have GreatNews setup to open all links in my default browser.
By default, GreatNews is configured to display all items in the RSS feed but that can be changed using the filtering options:
I was kinda hoping that Show All would be a toggle filter, i.e., you click Show All once to display read items and then click it once more to switch back to the “filtered” view. That doesn’t happen though (pity) so you have to select Unread from the dropdown once-more to go back.
Greatnews supports various “styles” for viewing news items – these are essentially CSS stylesheets and can be easily modified if you don’t like the default selections:
You can find user-created styles on the Greatnews forums, but frankly I found the “Simple” style to work best across all my feeds (YMMV obviously).
GreatNews offers the ability to “tag” various articles for further reading – it calls them labels. One thing to note is that right now, choosing to mark all feeds as read will reset your labels as well – obviously if you have were planning to read some long posts at a later date this can be a problem. When I raised this issue on the forums, the author told me a new type of label was being developed that lets you “archive” posts and will not be affected by the “mark all as read” option.
Where GreatNews really shines in comparision to online Feed Readers is tight integration with various online and offline tools:
For example, I have configured GreatNews to work with Windows Live Writer (which I what I am using to write this blog post), which means I get to use all the features of a rich blog editor without having to actually leave my RSS reader – neat!
The Tools screenshot above lists another feature of GreatNews – which is NewsWatches. I haven’t used this at all so far, but essentially it allows you to setup a search for certain key words in your subscriptions. It will pull together articles from different feeds based on your keywords and display it one place after each update.
GreatNews is portable, so if you want to you can install it on a thumbdrive and take your feeds with you that way. The application is fairly light as well (right now, it’s using about 18MB of RAM on my system).
Other Features:
1. Since this is an offline feed-reader, you can choose to read your feeds offline (duh) – Google Reader is now offering this thanks to Google Gears.
2. Your feeds database can be cleaned up whenever you think it has bloated to keep the disk usage down. However, infrequently updated feeds or feeds with bad time-stamps can be entirely purged by this cleanup, resulting in spurious unread counts. You can avoid this by manually excluding those feeds from the cleanup process.
3. GreatNews will identify feeds that haven’t been updated in 60 days (by default, you can change that if you want to) and let you delete those feeds if you choose to do so.
4. You can get a Feed Activity report if you are a statistics-geek (and which self-respecting geek isn’t? )
5. Feed Subscriptions can be imported / exported via OPML files. Always needed if you are planning to switch from one reader to another.
6. GreatNews doesn’t have an API, but all data is stored in an SQLite database, so there are ways to extract data from your feeds for mashups.
So there you have it – GreatNews offers almost all the functionality that a typical online feed reader would give you but with intergration to offline tools as well. The author of the software is open to suggestions and is pretty quick about pushing out updates.
If you are looking for an offline news reader that does the job for free, GreatNews should definitely at the top of your list.
Came across this article where Lifehacker hands out some LH-love for Media Monkey .
The monkey is everywhere I tell ya!
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