Newzie Blog http://blog.newzie.com Newzie Blog keeps you up-to-date with latest news about Newzie and its related services. If you like to learn more about Newzie, keep an eye on this blog. Copyright (c) 2004-2007 Newzie.com Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:05:14 -0700 Debut of RunningTalks.com; social network for free speech http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=071017045710 Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:05:14 -0700 http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=071017045710 We are very happy to introduce our brand new project. RunningTalks platform, or RT in short, is a free speech platform and free public service being developed by Ziemantics LLC.

RunningTalks platform enables people to share their opinions about talk subjects created by people themselves. People record and post their comments in audio on existing running talks via tools provided by the RunningTalks platform itself.

While everybody can browse running talks and listen to others' opinion, but only registered users can post their comments on existing running talks and create their own running talks to ask people's opinion about anything they can come up with.

Components of RunningTalks Platform

RunningTalks platform consists of a website www.runningtalks.com and a software application, called RTClient. In order to browse running talks, create new ones and post your comments, you can use both the website and the client since they provide same functions.

Our software application RTClient is used for accessing RunningTalks platform remotely from your desktop, so that you don't have to use any web browser. You can also use RTClient without having to sign up. It also provides some customization settings. Unfortunately, RTClient runs only on Windows machines.

Goals

We believe, RunningTalks platform has a very important role with ambitious goals to accomplish. Today social networks are the most convenient grounds for socialization and collaboration among people on the Internet and combining free speech act with the social networking concept is yet another untaken step on the Internet.

While embarking on that road, we have these goals in our minds:

  • Helping people share their experience
  • Being a platform for free speech
  • Providing innovative and fast user experience
  • Being a testbed for our future web-based applications

    • As we keep this platform up and running and more and more people start to make use of it, we will determine more specific goals for better and faster user experience.

    Support RunningTalks Platform

    We believe RunningTalks Platform will attrack many people from all countries around the world. Everybody will try to make use of the platform as much as possible by posting their comments and asking peoples' opinions. More people means more different opinions to listen to. We hope every member of this community help us spread the word so that everybody can get chance to say something about things happening around us.

    To support RT, we recommend you to share your own running talks with your friends, readers and listeners and let them comment on your talks. RT is especially good platform for brainstorming, so inform as much people as possible about your talks and let them brainstorm.

    Currently, RunningTalks platform is funded by donations of its community members and revenue of other projects developed at the Ziemantics Labs. We strongly recommend you to donate or purchase our products Ziepod+ or Zietag and help us afford the expenses of our servers and the bandwidth. Your donations will come back to you as new features and fast access.

    About Ziemantics LLC

    Ziemantics LLC was founded in the August of 2007 in Delaware by Arda Celebi, who is a computer engineer and the lead developer of all projects being developed at Ziemantics Labs.

    Ziemantics LLC is developing tools to process, manage and share information. RunningTalks platform is the fifth project developed at the Ziemantics Labs and the only one that is concentrated on information sharing concept.

    Other than RunningTalks platform, Ziemantics Labs also hosts Ziepod, Feedzie, Newzie and Zietag projects. You can learn more about these projects and the vision of Ziemantics LLC at www.ziemantics.com.

    All in all

    Please visit www.runningtalks.com and get into the platform. We hope you enjoy your time there and express yourself freely. RT is at the BETA stage so please report any anomaly you can find thru our feedback panel. And don't hesitate to add your suggestions as well. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts about RT.

    Have a nice day,

    ]]>     Our next "Big" project http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=070917060540 Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:12:21 -0700 http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=070917060540 As we mentioned before, at the Ziemantics Labs, we are at the final stages of a brand new web-based project. It is a free speech platform, enabling people to share their opinions on talk subjects which are created by people themselves. It has a really interesting and futuristic user interface, which is based on a combination of flash and AJAX techonologies. And above all, it will be a free service.

    Like to be a tester?

    We are still putting the final touches and hopefully within this week we will be starting its alpha test. And we are looking for volunteers for that test. Since we designed and developed the whole project from scratch (including Apache-like server itself and a specialized software application for remote access), we like to test it with as much people as possible to see how it performs under heavy load.

    If you like to become a tester, you just need to leave your email address thru [ this form ]. We will contact you when alpha test is ready for testing. Keep in mind that we will use your email address only for that purpose, since the project itself has its own test drivers email list that you can subscribe to if you like.

    New project is the most interesting and unique of all

    If you find Newzie unique and appealing, we want you to consider participating in our alpha tests and get a sneak preview of our next big project before everybody else. It is based on a very simple concept but what makes it interesting and powerful is that it provides such features that you can very easily share and reach content in the platform. Hope you like it.

    Besides, this new project includes a subproject which allows people to translate its visual components into languages other than English so that anybody from around the world will be able to make use of it. Since we will use that subproject to translate Newzie in upcoming months, we hope you give us a feedback on that before starting to use it for Newzie.

    Hope you want to be a tester and help us test our new project before its public debut. In return, we will give you a "present", which involves yet another new project from the Ziemantics to be released at the end of this year--"hopefully".

    Thanks in advance for your interest.

    ]]>     Newzie project became a part of the Ziemantics LLC http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=070831093647 Fri, 31 Aug 2007 07:57:21 -0700 http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=070831093647 It is a great honour and joy to announce that Newzie project became the part of the Ziemantics LLC along with our other projects as of now. Ziemantics LLC, the company, was found in the August of 2007 in Delaware by Arda Celebi, who is a computer engineer and the lead developer of the Newzie project, as well as Ziepod, Feedzie.com, and Zietag projects developed at the Ziemantics Labs.

    We believe being a part of a company means a lot. Like every company, Ziemantics has high goals to accomplish, in order to provide you the best. Newzie will be part of that plan and will gain strength from every part of this new born company.

    We like you to visit www.ziemantics.com to learn more about Ziemantics LLC and our goals. Hope you like the vision we have in mind and support our company by mentioning it to your friends, readers and listeners.

    In addition to this great announcement, we have one more in line. We are about to release a brand new project next week, which will be the fifth active project developed by Ziemantics and will be the biggest of all projects. Wanna hint? It is a web-based platform where people can share their thoughts and ideas with everybody in such a way that you may have never seen it before. It will be a free public service and everybody can make use of it. Sure, it will be the first of its kind on the Internet. Hope you like it.

    What about Newzie? At the Ziemantics Labs, we are currently at the design stage of a web-based news reader, which we will hook it up with Newzie. We believe it will be a great project on its own and power up the Newzie project.

    Have a great weekend,

    ]]>     Version 0.99.9 of Newzie released http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=070224061705 Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:11:21 +0000 http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=070224061705 Posts may include images that you may not like to see, such as images used to present advertisement. Newzie comes with a feature that enables you to block those unwanted images. For more details, check out http://blog.newzie.com. On the way to the 'Version One', we are at 0.99.9 and this release includes one of the most important milestones in the devolopment cycles of Newzie as it is now a portable application, which means that you can carry your Newzie along with your portable storage medium, such as an USB hard drive, and use it in any windows machine you come accross.

    Other than this neat portability feature, this release also includes security enhancements, various performance improvements to let you subscribe to more feeds by using less system resources, and a new way of viewing retrieved content. And, of course, there are things that we extracted as well, namely bugs. We squashed many bugs, including the one that preventing Newzie running on new Windows Vista OS, and we are grateful for our dedicated Newzie users who reported those anomalies and helped us detect them. Many thanks goes to these people.

    Before getting into the detail, we like to thank to everybody who shared their experience with us and sent feedback and suggestions to make Newzie better. Since we are mostly focused on reaching to the 'Version One', new features may not answer your requests but we sure have a long list of features waiting to be added after the 'Version One'

    Below, we briefly touched on the concepts behind this release and a short note about the version 1.0:

    Neat portability feature

    By making use of new portability feature, you will be able to stay connected to your favorite feeds from any computer you can find. What can you do with portable Newzie? Here are what we had in mind while developing this feature:

    1) If you have multiple computers and a flash disk or some medium that you can keep your Newzie stored inside and play it from there, then you don't need to install your Newzie for each computer you have. Just keep it on the storage medium and then run it from any Windows-based computer you can find.

    2) If you are formating your computer or simply want to backup your data for any case, you can copy all Newzie environment into another place and use it whenever you want without losing a bit of information.

    3) You can install Newzie for each windows account on your computer or even keep multiple instances in one account. Both cannot be done with previous versions.

    Keep in mind that we prepared a tutorial about things you need to consider and be aware of before starting to use this neat feature. Check [ How-to: Portability ] tutorial to learn more.

    Security enhancements

    Feeds you subscribe to may lead to security issues if some fancy scripts are embedded into the content. Based on this fact, we included a new feature to the Newzie package. New version checks retrieved content for thousands of cases that may lead to security issues and removes them if there is any. Hence, you should feel more secure while using this latest version.

    Title bar and Two-column content listing

    Till the newest version, Newzie is very good at presenting retrieved content in html-based pages but not that much good at showing them in conventional listing like your email client lists your emails. New title bar and two-column listing mode will fill that lack and enable you to access retrieved posts in better and easier way than ever.

    Shown above, new Title Bar is located at the top of listed posts and shows the title of focused feed along with filter options at the right handside of the bar. By using these, you will be able focus on specific type of posts, such as listing just new posts or flagged ones. That type of selective view allows you to reach what you want to see quickly.

    Another new feature is the two-column view of listed posts. While this new view lists more posts in more compact way, as it uses the whole panel vertically to show the content of focused post, in most of the cases you don't need to scroll down to see the whole content of that focused post. as can be seen in the sample screenshot above.

    While approaching to the Version 1.0

    This release is especially important to make Newzie more bug-free and stable before getting to the 'Version 1.0' We removed many bugs in all shapes and sizes as you can tell by checking the raw release notes of this release. We will release couple of more clearance-oriented releases before releasing the version 1.0.

    At this point, your feedback is the most valuable information for us. Do you know that you can send your feedback in a second by using Newzie? Just use 'ALT+F' key combination (which is a new keyboard shortcut coming with the new release) to access 'Newzie Feedback Window' and enter your feedback before clicking 'Send' button. Send whatever message you like to say and we will answer your questions and welcome your suggestions. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

    To learn more about this release and download the latest Newzie release, use the links below. If you already have Newzie installed, make sure that you first uninstall your existing one and then reinstall the new one. Keep in mind that you will not loose any information during this process. To learn more about how to upgrade, we strongly recommend you to check the 'Upgrade Instructions' .

    Have a smooth ride with the newest Newzie

  • Upgrade Instructions (recommended)
  • Download Newzie version 0.99.9
  • Read release notes for Newzie version 0.99.9

    • ]]>     Stripping out Unwanted http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=061028093028 Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:31:21 +0000 http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=061028093028 Posts may include images that you may not like to see, such as images used to present advertisement. Newzie comes with a feature that enables you to block those unwanted images. For more details, check out http://blog.newzie.com.
    For more details, check out http://blog.newzie.com. ]]>     On Fly Filtering of Subscriptions http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=061013071647 Mon, 16 Oct 2006 13:50:05 +0000 http://blog.newzie.com/index.php?postid=061013071647 One of the most unique features of Newzie is that it enables you to select a subset of your subscriptions to be shown in your 'My Subscriptions' panel and apply available commands on those listed subscriptions, such as synchronizing them. In this post, we will get into this feature and give you couple of tips. You will see that, it's such a handy feature that you can't live without it. For more details, check out http://blog.newzie.com.
    In this post, we will get into this feature and give you couple of tips. You will see that, it's such a handy feature that you can't live without it.

    For more details, check out http://blog.newzie.com. ]]>