I was going to write a piece about Writing Kit and how I use it. Never mind, read Shawn Blanc’s article instead. It is worth it.

BTW, the credit for the headline goes to Merlin Mann for mentioning Writing Kit in episode 113 of the Back to Work podcast.

I have had a look at Mono Develop from time to time, only to conclude that it is just not ready, not for prime time and not for anything else.

I failed to get even the simplest of examples do as I wanted them to do. There were weird compilation errors and also the run-time was not very stable.

That’s why I was initially skeptical when I learned about Xamarin Studio that has Mono Develop in its genes. Eventually, I got around my concerns and gave it a spin.

It’s been more than half a year now since I “sunset” my Google account. The last thing I was using it for was Google Reader, admittedly the motherlode of RSS consumption on the Internet. However, for various reasons I felt more and more uncomfortable with it and eventually switched to fever, created by Shaun Inman, which every buyer is supposed to host themselves.

The RSS experience is great; fever comes with a “feedlet” that makes subscribing to new feeds a real breeze. I also like the idea of the very basic grouping of feeds into “kindling” and “sparks”. I rarely use the “hot” category but from time to time it is worth visiting.

The Internet has already seen a couple of bookmarking services rise and decline. Pinboard¹ is still relatively new and yet it has already established itself a worthy competitor to the establishment.

At first I was hesitant because I could not see the benefit of gathering my bookmarks somewhere on the Internet. Every browser worth its salt comes with a bookmark administration feature. So why bother?

Out of fairness, I feel obliged to follow up with my previous article, in particular I’d like to mention that after some weeks of working nearly without flaws, Instacast’s sync mechanism stopped working completely on my devices.

I have tried reinstalling the app, I have tried logging out and back into my account, to no avail. I just could not get the thing back to work and I have found no help on the Internet so far.

Given that, I switched again to Downcast because Downcast fits my needs better in terms of which use cases I’d like support. For example, in a playlist I like to group all episodes of one podcast even if there are episodes of other podcasts released in between. That’s simply how I roll, just my personal preference.

Anyway, in Downcast this setting is possible whereas I have found no way to get Instacast into supporting this behavior.

The bottom line is that I have (once again) been going full circle on my podcatcher preferences and I’m back where I started. It seems as if - for the foreseeable future - I will have to live with iCloud’s unreliability for non-Apple apps.