Google Reader is going the way of the dodo. I am/was an active Reader user. Mostly from the browser while I had some spare minutes I would dip and read some of the latest news. The news hast left me somewhat wary of online alternatives. There have been quite a few mentioned: http://www.newsblur.com/ http://www.feedly.com/ http://www.netvibes.com/ https://www.pulse.me/ While all of these seem perfectly reasonable, it’s all coming back to the same issue for me.

I recently installed on my Galaxy S3 a new keyboard called Swift Keys. I’m amazed at how good it is. Ok, I can still type on a keyboard faster, but still it’s a marked improvement from other keyboards out there. I have felt lately that whomever can find a way to make text input on a tablet/smartphone would go a long way to bridging the gap between the traditional PC and current hand held devices.

We recently finished up on a couple of facebook apps at Brando. The first, an app for Lifestyle Sports, gave me a chance to look further into the Wowza server and live streaming. The cam seems to be broadcasting though and I’ve learned a few things about setup for this. I’m quite happy with the results. The first was for BUPI. It allowed the user to upload an image of their child, and then put them in a Christmas card.

I’ve done a lot of flash video players over the years. Too many. Some had custom interfaces, some used the default flash video component. Others were completely custom, managing the stream events and displaying the video in the vanilla video component. Then Dave came to me with the OSMF Strobe Media Playback component. We had tried the JW Player a couple of times before, but found the per domain price a little excessive outside of large clients.

I recently wanted to insert a class for the case where a menu item has children in Wordpress. There doesn’t appear to be any option to do this in wp_nav_menu function, so I started doing some research. I found out from this article how to add a ’last-menu-item’ css class. This doesn’t quite work for what I wanted though, because the returned data object from Wordpress doesn’t tell you if the current node has children.