What is Atom?

The quick answer, for those who have heard of RSS or “syndication” is that Atom is a better version of the same thing.

Basically it is a standard, XML-based format for news items published on websites. The advantage of using Atom or RSS is that users (that’s you) can easily watch a feed for updates; what‘s more, it‘s possible to aggregate many feeds together so you can see all of your news in one place.

How do I read an Atom feed?

The simplest way to use an Atom feed is to drop it into Safari's bookmark bar. This is what Apple have done with the pre-configured RSS feeds; what’s more, the numbers in brackets after each of the folders in the bookmarks bar show the number of unread articles in that folder. If you click on one of them, Safari will display all of the articles you've asked to view.

For those using FireFox rather than Safari, there are a variety of plug-ins available, for instance Sage, that can be used to give FireFox support for Atom and RSS feeds.

There are also standalone readers such as NetNewsWire, and even web-based services such as newsgator and Bloglines.

Many programs that can read RSS can also read Atom feeds, and generally speaking they provide the same user interface in both cases. There are still a few programs that only support RSS; if you’re stuck with one of those, you can pester the developer to add support for Atom, or you can use a web-based service to turn the Atom feed into an RSS feed.

We may add RSS-format feeds as well at some point, we’ll see.

For more information as well as a list of programs that support Atom, please see the AtomEnabled website.

What are you using Atom for?

At present, it's used for the update mechanism in our applications. This is called appcasting, and is a relatively new idea. Our products can automatically update themselves based on the Atom feeds we publish, or you can read the feeds directly yourselves.

The benefit to you, our customers, is that you can easily watch for updates without all of the problems associated with e-mail, and without constantly checking e.g. VersionTracker to see if we've released a new version. You can even put the feeds for all of your favourite applications right in your browser or feed reader, then you'll be notified in one place when any of them are updated!

It's even possible to download the updates direct from the appcast feeds. In our case, we still ask for a username/password, but if you save that in your keychain you can keep downloading the latest update and let your Mac remember your details for you.

In addition, you'll find that from now on, the release notes and even links to past versions will remain in the appcast feeds, so you'll be able to read them and even downgrade if you really want.

OK, where are the feeds?

We have feeds for both of our current products, iDefrag and iPartition.

In future, it’s likely that we’ll add more feeds.