Twelve South has been busy this year. Their latest new product, following HiRise, is a brand new laptop stand made out of lucite. From the product page:

GhostStand is a transparent, ultra-modern platform– and a brilliant work of art– that elevates MacBook to a more comfortable viewing height. Pair your MacBook with a full-size keyboard and mouse, then set it on GhostStand to enjoy desktop style comfort at home or work. While GhostStand makes it look like your MacBook is floating in midair, two sets of soft silicone rails keep your Mac safely grounded to this affordable lucite stand.

It’s also $34.99, and can alternatively be purchased from the Apple Store online. It would pair well with a lot of Mac accessories, including those famous Harman Kardon SoundSticks. I was under the impression that the interlocking pieces of glass could be separated, making the stand portable, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. This is very much a stationary piece for your desk, designed to look beautiful and give the appearance that your Mac is floating on air.

It’s little more than a configuration utility, but Chromecast for iOS (App Store link) lets you set up your newly acquired dongle so that you can connect it to your Wi-Fi network and change your device name and password.

Shawn Blanc:

And so, could this hypothetical service take all that information, put it into a database, and then find and recommend things for me to read? I think yes. That’d be the easy part. The hard part is if the service could pick out articles for me as well as Pandora can at pick out songs, or as well as Netflix can pick out 4-star movies. Now, wouldn’t that be something?

Services like Feedly, Feedbin, and Feed Wrangler have pretty much nailed the filesystem of news idea of RSS readers (with some unique differences, as Shawn outlines for Feed Wrangler).

The next step is discovery of relevant and personalized news in an RSS-based environment. No one seems to be doing that quite right at this point and there are a lot of services and technologies that may be using RSS in the backend but that are trying different proprietary approaches. Flipboard with magazines and top stories; Zite with algorithms; Feedly with popular feeds; others with lightweight Twitter and Facebook integrations.

My primary concern is that a feature such as the one envisioned by Shawn – which I’d love, by the way – would require a tremendous amount of scale, data, analysis, time, and, ultimately, resources, which I’m not sure an independently developed feed reader could ever have (or pull off properly). But, yes, that sort of news recommendation inside a feed reader would be fantastic.

From the guys who make sharing notes between iOS, Android, and your desktop computer simple:

We’ve been beta testing new versions of Simplenote for Mac, Android, and iOS 7. They look a lot different: cleaner, simpler, and more lightweight. Our approach was to return to first principles and build anew.

A side effect is that some less frequently used features won’t be available, at least at first. Some people will cheer. Others, like those who adore sorting notes by reverse chronological creation date, may mourn. More details are coming soon.

Also of note are improvements to Simperium, which should make syncing between your devices faster and more seamless.

ReadKit, my favorite RSS/read later client for OS X, has been updated today to version 2.3, which brings a new icon, several bug fixes, and some new welcome features.

For me, the two most important additions are the improved sharing system and a global preference to group items by date or feed. The latter is available in Preferences > General, but there’s also a smart folder-specific setting that can override the general preference (so if you like to group a smart folder by feed instead of date, you can do that). Sharing is reminiscent of Reeder in that it supports services like Evernote, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinboard and it lets you assign custom keyboard shortcuts to each sharing service.

I’m a fan of the new sharing options, as they are faster to activate than drag & drop between sources (which was already supported). As the developers write:

ReadKit started out as a read later application for Instapaper, Pocket and Readability and it wasn’t so important to share articles between these services, despite the fact that it has worked with a simple drag-and-drop. Then RSS abilities has been added to the application, but the way of sharing remained unchanged. It’s time to improve this functionality, so this version introduces the new sharing menu, customizable sharing shortcuts and the ability to send articles into non-premium Instapaper accounts as well. Additional improvements and services are coming soon.

I’ve been using ReadKit every day since version 2.0 and I highly recommend it. The 2.3 update is available on the Mac App Store.