OK, the silence is broken. Sorry for the absence from the blog, but things have been a little crazy in the real world. I’ll get to that over the course of the next few days.

Right now, though, I’m at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas, and while I haven’t even been able to step foot on the floor yet, Apple has already unleashed a slew of updates and new products:

• Updates across the line for PowerBooks and iBooks. The PowerBooks now top out at 1.5Ghz with a 4xDVD-R drive, and iBooks go to 1.2Ghz starting at just $1,099.
• eMacs have been seriously upgraded to 1.25Ghz, with a superdrive option for only $999.
• Final Cut Pro HD, which is really FCP 4.5. Lots of new features, including much improved workflow with other apps like LiveType, and lots of new support for HD over firewire.
• Updates to LiveType, CinemaTools, etc.
• DVD Studio Pro 3.0 with much improved workflow and integration, and the return of the flowchart view from 1.5.
• Shake 3.5, which is still too expensive for my blood, but I’m not sure I have a use for such a high-end compositing package, yet.
• Motion. New product that looks to compete with AfterEffects. Must look into this one today.
• xSan – xServe RAID on steroids. 64 simultaneous users, each with up to 400Mbps throughput to a common data store, perfect for video postproduction environments.

And that’s just what they announced in the last 24 hours. This is gonna be a fun week.

As I’ve written before, NetNewsWire Pro is my news reader/RSS aggregator of choice. I’ve just submitted a feature request to Brent that I hope he will seriously consider.

As the owner of a several macs, I’d like the ability to use NNW on many machines throughout the day. It would be nice to not only sync the subscriptions on each machine, but to also sync the history of read articles.

Another issue I see looming on the horizon is the growth in traffic associated with the constant, regualr polling of RSS feeds by aggregators. It’s already becoming a problem for bloggers that are popular; and they’re paying the price in bandwidth charges.

One approach I could suggest is using WebDAV or simple FTP with a server as the intermediate. Perhaps a configuration option in NNW could set one machine as the “master” and others as “subordinate” readers. The “master” machine would do the aggregation, and post a master XML of the aggregated feeds to a WebDAV server. The “subordinate” machines could then poll this intermediate server for the aggregate once, instead of repolling all the individual feed servers. As articles are read on a given machine (or at some point when the app hasn’t seen activity from the user for some period of time), it posts it’s “reads” up to the server for the other machines to sync with.

This way, my desktop at the office could be the polling machine, staying up to date with feeds throughout the day. And when I go home to my home machine (or open my powerbook), it reads the aggregated feed from my server and is up to date with what I’ve read on my office mac.

I dare say most web users have access to at least a small amount of server space accessible via FTP, and could configure it to be the intermediate store (most ISPs give you 10MB or more of webspace for a site, that could easily be used).

I think this would be an extremely useful feature, and further separate NNW apart from the competition as the best RSS aggregator in existence, on any platform.

Heck, I’d even be interested in helping him develop it. I wonder if it could be developed as a NNW add-on? I’ll have to look into that.