The API is neat, but a little limited so far. Hopefully it will be expanded in the future with some additional info.

This is hitting third-party developers pretty hard, as a lot of other services and applications lean on the API. Feedly, for instance, uses it as their entire backend. They’re currently working on a project they call Normandy, which is clone of the Reader API for their own backend, and they plan to allow other developers access to it. Similarly, the developer of Reeder—my preferred RSS aggregator for iOS and OS X—is planning to find a new solution as well. (Unless I’m mistaken, Reeder only uses Google Reader for synchronizing subscriptions and unread items. The iOS version can already use Fever instead of Google Reader.)

For those who are looking for a new solution for reading RSS feeds, there are plenty of options out there. LifeHacker has compiled a few suggestions, both web-based services and desktop clients.

Perhaps the shuttering of Google Reader could be a good thing for developers of feed readers. Torpedoing an industry juggernaut usually does wonders for a field, enabling smaller companies to innovate without the dominant company controlling the market. The RSS reader arena was more lively before Google Reader took off. It would be nice to see a resurgence.

Scratchpad

This is handy for experimenting with an idea, and potentially useful for beginners as well.

Some may notice the similarity to jsFiddle, a popular site that does essentially the same thing, though in a different way. Scratchpad greatly simplifies the UI, and has a single code pane rather than individual ones for HTML, CSS and JavaSceipt, making it a lot more newbie-friendly. Scratchpad is also using the fantastic Ace editor for the editing pane, which does a great job of feeling like a native text editor in your browser.

One really cool feature is live-saving. Each document gets a unique URL that you can copy and send to somebody, and they’ll see the same document. Changes are saved as you work, and if one user makes a change, it’s instantly mirrored on the other user’s computer. (Try it: copy the URL into another window or tab and change the CSS. It changes in the other window right away.) This could be useful to help somebody out. They could paste in a page they’re having trouble with, and you could make corrections and demonstrate the effects in real time.

Bonus tip: If you click the menu icon in the top left, you can see a list of documents you edited recently.

This raises questions about the future of FeedBurner. Is Google planning to shutter the service as well? Coupled with the recent discontinuation of AdSense for Feeds, things not looking too good. If they do end up phasing out FeedBurner, it will break a lot of feed URLs. I’m sure at least three quarters of the feeds in my RSS reader are hosted by FeedBurner. Some transparency would be nice.

With Stripe, you get a no-hassle API and minimal fees. 2.9% + 30 cents, payed out to any bank account. The only requirement is that you set up HTTPS for customers’ safety. (Technically, there is one other thing that may be an issue: Stripe is only available to US merchants for the time being.)

Nettuts+ has an excellent tutorial on how to set up a Stripe account and process transactions through the API: So You Want to Accept Credit Cards Online?

The most difficult part is probably purchasing an SSL certificate and setting your server up to use HTTPS. Some hosts sell certificates, and may be able to configure your server for you. If you’re on your own, though, RapidSSL seems to be a good option. (They’re affordable and on the trust list of most browsers.)

So You Want to Accept Credit Cards Online? [Nettuts+]

Here are a few useful web apps that help you do things like choose a color palette or add vendor prefixes to your CSS.

Sprite Cow

Sprite Cow makes it easy to get the background-position offset and element dimensions for an item in your CSS sprite. It’s so much easier than trying to figure it out in Photoshop. All you have to do in most cases is click the part of the sprite you want to use and copy the coordinates into your CSS. Most of the time, it does an excellent job at selecting the relevant pixels.

Prefixr

Vendor prefixes enable browser to implement experimental versions of new CSS properties without causing compatibility issues down the line, once they become standardizes. Unfortunately, while current versions of some browsers (like Firefox) may understand border-radius and box-shadow, or whatever CSS3 property you’re trying to use, older versions require the vendor prefix still. That’s where Prefixr comes in. Paste your CSS in, and it will automatically ensure that your styles work in as many browsers as possible. It even handles the weird filter syntax that older versions of IE use. There are also numerous plugins to integrate it with your favorite text editor.

Kuler

Adobe’s Kuler is a tool for creating and sharing color palettes. Its editor lets you choose between Analogous, Triad, Complementary, Compond, Shades and free-form modes.

ColourLovers

ColourLovers works off a similar concept to that of Kuler. It’s all about creating, discovering and saving color palettes. ColourLovers has the advantage of a nice API, and integration with the ColorSchemer app for iOS.

JSFiddle

Need to brainstorm a bit of CSS or JavaScript? Or maybe you want to share something clever you did? JSFiddle is an interactive pastebin site that shows a live preview of any modifications you make, and it keeps multiple revisions as you save your changes.

Noise Texture Generator

Noise Texture Generator does what it says on the box: it makes textured images alike to what you would get using the Noise filter in Photoshop, but with an instant preview.

What The Font?

What The Font? attempts to use its powerful magic to identify the font used in an image you upload. It gives you a list of matches that may or may not be what you’re looking for, but are usually pretty close if not the exact font.

AjaxLoad

Need a throbber graphic for part of your website? AjaxLoad has a ton of options, and it can tailor them to fit your color scheme. They’re all animated GIFs, of course, since support for animated PNG images never took off.

Stripe Generator

Stripe Generator is along similar lines as Noise Generator. It’s an easy way to make stripey background patterns.

ConvertICO

Favicons are usually a pain to make, since Photoshop and most other popular image editors won’t export to the ICO container format by default. ConvertICO is a simple tool that accepts an upload of a PNG graphic and quickly converts it to ICO.

Minus is primarily a web application, with a spiffy HTML5 drag-and-drop uploader. Just drop a file onto the page, copy the link and share. Couldn’t be simpler.

There are applications for OS X, Windows and Linux (as well as mobile phones and tablets) that allow you to upload files without loading up the website. The desktop apps work by allowing you to drop a file onto an icon.

Minus is free for now, but they have some limits in place. Files can be no larger than 200MB each, but there is no limit to the number you can upload. If you upload a lot of small files, Minus could certainly be a more attractive option than CloudApp, which only allows 10 uploads per day for free accounts.

If you’re looking for a way to quickly share files with people, Minus is worth a look. Even if you don’t need it very often, it’s a great tool to keep in your arsenal.

Enter TestFlight.

I’m not sure how it does it, but TestFlight takes the pain out of iOS beta distribution. You just build an app, upload it, enter some email addresses, and TestFlight magically takes care of the rest.

When a beta tester gets an email from TestFlight, they register their device by logging into the TestFlight website on their iOS device. It installs a provisioning profile over the air, and lets them access your uploaded application builds in the same way.

However it does its magic, TestFlight is an indispensable tool for developers.

Microsoft says that they plan to subsidize Last.fm for Windows Phone 7 and Xbox so their users will not have to pay the subscription.

This change will go into effect on February 15.

Free Last.fm service on mobile devices turning into subscriber-only feature [Ars Technica]

Google Storage for Developers will cost $0.17 per gigabyte per month for storage, plus transfer fees. It seems slightly more expensive for the month-to-month fee, but the bandwidth charges might be cheaper. For the duration of the preview Google is offering “100 gigabytes of storage and 300 gigabytes of bandwidth per month” at no cost.

It’s also worth noting that Google offers App Engine, a cost-efficient cloud hosting solution for Python/Rails/Java applications. Amazon has a similar service as part of their impressive AWS suite. With either provider, Google or Amazon, you could cheaply run a large web application more efficiently than if you were having to manually deploy physical servers. Reddit awhile ago switched from running their own servers to using AWS and has had nothing but good things to say about it.

It’s nice to see some more competition in this area. Hopefully it will lead to lower prices.