Re: Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age (James Gleick)

From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Mon Apr 23 2001 - 07:34:26 MDT


Bryan Moss wrote:
> Urgh. I was falling asleep by the third page. Everything on
> the Web is *at least* 6 pages long and goes off on every
> tangent imaginable.

I haven't read the article yet, but have a technique for reading long
articles. Use the 'printer-friendly' version if available, maximize the
page to cover the entire screen (F11 in MSIE or Opera), and up the font
so it's easily visible while leaning back in your chair or even walking
around the room.

On occassion I've used freeware or shareware text-to-speech convertors
to listen to long articles, though the quality and ease of use of the
products I've tried seems fairly poor.

Personally, I would pay quite a bit for a real power browser. At the
moment, I'm beginning to prefer Opera over MSIE and Mozilla over
Netscape. MSIE is arguably more configurable via the varying trust
zones, though this comes at the expense of ease of use, and I almost
always set specific pages to total trust and all others to total
paranoia mode.

I'm also digging the gesture navigation available in the new Opera
(5.11). I can see a power browser being built from either Mozilla or
Opera, since MS and Netscape/AOL seems too pro-marketing (bad term) to
allow users total freedom over web page viewing.

        -Mike

-- 
======================================================================
Michael Wiik
Principal
Messagenet Communications Research
Washington DC Area Internet and WWW Consultants
http://messagenet.com
mwiik@messagenet.com
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