[ANN] News Reader Stack Available

[Scott Rossi]

Greetings List:

- THE SHORT
I've made available a small news browser for grabbing and reading the news
off of MacCentral.  The stack requires MetaCard 2.5 or Revolution 2.  To
access it, launch our stack player by entering the following command in your
message box:

  go stack url "http://www.tactilemedia.com/panel.mc"

Click the MetaCard Demo Stacks link, and then launch the stacked named
MacCentral News Reader.

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- THE LONG
After lamenting the organization/interaction of most news sites on the Web,
I thought I'd try to build a stack that would provide me with (what I
believe is) easier and faster viewing of news headlines and stories.  More
comprehensive than RSS, this project started me thinking about the
development of specialized Web browsers or "MiniBrowsers" whose goal is to
access and display publicly available HTML in focused and unique ways.

This particular stack is targeted to MacCentral, a news source for
Macintosh-related information, and should work fine on both Mac and Windows
Platforms under MC or Rev.  All news is displayed in a single resizable
window, with adjustable panes to customize the volume of text displayed.
Currently, this specialized browser provides access to the day's current
headlines, the accompanying news stories and related past articles
(currently external links).  All information is pulled directly from the
site's HTML.

While this seems like a useful tool to me, one issue here is this model
flies in the face of the ad-supported Web site -- the stack bypasses most of
the extraneous stuff in the source HTML (ads, other content and more ads) to
get to the core information.  On one hand, this is bad for the site in that
potential revenue-generating click-throughs are thrown away.  On the other
hand, I get to what I want faster and without the noise.  Not sure if
there's a happy medium for both sides...

In any event, specialized browsers seem like an area worth exploring.
Several other targeted browsers under development, and soon I'll post a
project that makes a connection between products in an online database and
eBay: look up the product in the database and then search eBay to see if the
product is available, all from the same interface.  Perhaps this is
interesting for some folks.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
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E: scott at tactilemedia.com
W: http://www.tactilemedia.com