raven's dashboard

Does EventBox support showing Google Reader's Starred Items?

According to the Help, "favorites" are supported:
http://thecosmicmachine.com/eventbox/...

In the section on limitations, there is no mention of not showing the starred items folder:
http://thecosmicmachine.com/eventbox/...

However, in my EventBox, I have no starred items folder. My feeds are present in their folders, and I can star an individual item, but I can't see all of my starred items at once.

I want to star items, not flag them, so they sync with Google Reader. I also use Byline on the iPhone, and I want to be able to star an item there then read it later in EventBox, much like how clippings work between the Mac and iPhone versions of NetNewsWire.

I actually wouldn't mind if Flagging/Starring was the same thing. Google Reader and Twitter both use the Star icon as their favoriting system, and I don't need "flags" on top of that. In fact, when I use NetNewsWire, I ignore their Flagged area too and only used Clippings.

I'm getting frustrated with the unbalanced difficulty of Dr. Awesome. I just had a patient die when the following happened: two out of three sections were won when a freeze power-up appeared, then proceeded to lose five times on the final section (and no freezes appeared during this time). It's pretty ridiculous when you can only have a chance of winning a level if a specific power-up appears and you're lucky enough to get it, and while that might not be technically true, it's how I feel right now.

The problem for me in describing this is that most of the following points, in isolation, isn't that bad, but combined things get too frustrating.

1) The bacteria are always chasing you along the edges.

2) The large viruses seem to always be firing with deadly accuracy, which you can only prevent by staying on the edge.

3) The viruses seem to love to group together, making it difficult to cut off a section separating them. Instead you're always cutting along the edges until you have a large clump of viruses, no room to move, and still 20% to cut away to win.

4) You're always running out of time, so trying to deal with 1-3 tends to mean one mistake and you're dead.

Here's what I suggest.

1) Whenever a section (perhaps over a certain percentage) gets completed, "zap" the edges to remove all bacteria. That way if you make a hail mary cut across the middle and manage to make it you don't get killed because you missed the bacteria coming along the edge as you were dodging in the middle.

2) Relatedly, whenever you get hit the bacteria should zap so you have a moment to get your bearings. There's been many times I move to cut, get shot by a virus, then a second later I respawn and get hit by a bacteria and die.

3) I'm half convinced the Quickness and Slow power-ups don't actually do anything. The only things that are useful are Freeze and Shrink (and these two can often still be useless if you all the viruses are clumped together), and Time is always useful. At higher difficulties, I feel like every power-up I manage to get to should be beneficial and right now I just get upset that the real useful ones aren't showing up.

4) This is the main point: More diversity in how viruses behave. There should be at least one virus that hates to be near others of it's kind, so the clumping isn't always a problem. Perhaps one virus that never shoots, another that shoots but has no bacteria, etc. One virus that only comes in small size and not large. Perhaps one where you can get hit without taking time damage (but the clock can still run out naturally). Maybe some levels require only 50% cut away to win the level? Right now it feels like I'm fighting the same thing all the time with a "skin" change. And by altering the viruses behavior more, it allows you to keep all the challenging stuff like shooting, bacteria, grouping, etc. without forcing it all on you all at once.

Anything you folks can think of to reduce the frustration would be appreciated. I don't mind a challenge, but I'm losing my friends and family out there!

One of the things I like about Brightkite is I can create Placemarks of areas I go to often and areas I'm interested in. On my Mac, I can go to my Placemarks, select one, and read the associated Placestream to see what's going on in that area.

On the iPhone I get my list of Placemarks, but no way to quickly read up on their Placestreams. It would be nice if, in addition to checking in, I could get a link from my Placemarks to their Placestreams.

On the Mac OS X Address Book, if you go into Preferences and select vCard, there is an option to "Enable private me card". When enabled, you can edit your personal card and uncheck any line of information you don't want to share.

This could be useful if you don't want to share a birthday, or if you want to have your home address in your card, but not share it with business contacts. Once you've decided on what info you want private, you can export your vCard, and that private info will not be in the exported copy.

However, viewing the info on your iPhone is not any different. It's still your information, of course, it's just private if you export to send to another person. And Apple doesn't provide a way for you to give your vCard to another person using only the iPhone so until now it hasn't been an issue.

Now there's Friend Book and my question. Are the "private fields" of my vCard set in such a way on my iPhone that if I were to do the sharing feature of Friend Book the card the recipient gets would match an exported card from Mac OS X's Address Book? Or would the recipient get my "whole card" including the marked private fields?