The Good, the Bad, and the Retarded

So the UI is “the Good”, the engine behind this app is “the Bad” and the Google Reader user experience is “the Retarded”. I was concerned during the beta with Google Reader as the application was pretty much unusable with a gReader account active in it. I read a few praising reviews after its launch and hoped that they had fixed the show-stopping issues and purchased this app. It was definitely better and I loved using it despite the eye-rollingly long launch time for the app (when there’s a gReader account active in it).

“The Retarded” really came about the first time Google syncing failed. Removing the gReader account and re-adding it didn’t work. After some searching I found that a lot of others were complaining about this issue on their forums. The solutions involved removing the Google Reader Keychain entry. Fine, it worked. Ok, happy again, sort of. Then it happened again… and again! Reps on the Realmac forums claimed that “Google changed their API”. At this point I reopened NetNewsWire (which I hadn’t used for 6 months) and it loaded ridiculously fast (after my Socialite experience), connected fine, AND loaded new articles without freezing the application. Not sure about the Google API thing, as it doesn’t seem to affect NetNewsWire (free app) at all.

The retarded… in colour!

To illustrate just how poorly Socialite handles Google Reader I timed various application activities under the following conditions:

• Socialite 1.0.2 used.
• Test machine: Macbook Pro 2.33GHz, 4 gigs ram.
• Timing using stopwatch on iPhone.
• 3 Twitter accounts and 1 Facebook account in Socialite.
• 169 RSS feeds in Google Reader.
• Photoshop CS4 and Blender were thrown in to compare with “heavy lifting” applications.
• Coffee was brewed using electric kettle, single plunger and freshly ground Guatemalan coffee beans.

So basically one could launch and close Tweetie/NetNewsWire about 3 times before Socialite would be usable and I could brew two individual mugs of coffee before Socialite becomes responsive again while trying to load my Google Reader account. When the application takes over 40 seconds to load, it grinds against the philosophy of Twitter and I find myself launching the free version of Tweetie when I just want to quickly Tweet something.

Note: During writing this post I did try the Socialite 1.0.3 beta which promises to fix the  Google Reader authentication issue. The application still feels a bit sluggish in response at times but the launch time with Google Reader looks like it has dropped quite dramatically to 10-15s (cold start still takes forever). Memory usage seems slightly better as well. This means that the next update may prove to bring this application into the realm of usable!