When NetNewsWire went with Google Reader syncing, the hair stood up on the back of my neck.  I swore off Google Reader quite some time ago.  Indeed, I was using NNW to avoid Google Reader.  Now I’m being forced back?

It was time to look into splitting up with NNW.

I haven’t used RSS support in OS X since Safari 3, so I decided to give it a new try in Safari 4.  Part of my original problem with RSS support in Safari was no conceivable way to sync the read status across Macs.  Well, turns out they put that support into bookmark sync over MobileMe, they just didn’t notify me.  Thanks, Apple.

Anyway, I was researching how to do this on the net and it looked painful.  Everyone’s steps included loading up Firefox, attaching the Sage plugin to it and importing/exporting yadda yadda… blah, it should NOT be that hard.

So I opened NetNewsWire and just casually dragged a feed title into the bookmark bar in Safari.  I was shocked to discover that Safari took the bookmark just fine.  Once I opened it, it processed the bookmark as a feed and started syncing it.

That was easy.

You still have to open the bookmark one time before it starts syncing it automatically, but just do the “open in tabs” thing and you’ll be fine.  Screw all that Firefox/Sage import/export garbage.  It’s just a drag and drop.  Enjoy.

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If you find that there’s an address book card out there that isn’t syncing with MobileMe, your iPhone, or another Mac… check to see if there is an ampersand in the failing record anywhere.  Apparently once a card hits MobileMe, it doesn’t like the ampersand in the vcard and chokes on it.  If MobileMe chokes on it, all of your devices will be unable to find the new card.

Just another tip from yours truly.

I’m in New Orleans this week, working project stuff for the day job.  Lots of fun here.  More later.

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You can imagine my dismay and disappointment when I discovered that some kind of problem is preventing my site from publishing to MobileMe successfully. I even filed a bug on it.  Lots of posts in the forums about it too, but I don’t see the major Mac blogs taking up the yoke of pressing the issue with Apple.  That’s also disappointing because it’s likely they won’t do much about it until it gets really ugly and public.

Sigh.  So I deleted porkbuns.org for now, until I can get it published.  Please keep your feedreaders subscribed there.  Eventually it’ll come back up.

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The net is abuzz tonight as MobileMe users recieve more notices that MobileMe still isn’t what Apple had hoped it would be, so it’s offering 60 days more for free.

Paul Thurrott has already played the part of the cynic and provided a rather insightful metaphor, but I’m going to come down on the positive side and say that MobileMe has been a wonderful experience for me.  Not only has it been wonderful, it’s turned my iPhone into something I can only describe as a thing of glory.

Combining home data sync over MobileMe with work data sync over ActiveSync, all on the same device, has been absolutely wonderful.  I realize, however, that the experience on Windows just isn’t that fab.  That’s okie with me though, Windows users need to be using Apple products on Apple products anyway.

Kinda like Microsoft products work best on Microsoft products.  It’s just common sense.

At least I think it is.

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