[ANN] News Reader Stack Available

[Ken Ray]

Awesome work, Scott! Very useful...

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/ 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: metacard-admin at lists.runrev.com 
> [mailto:metacard-admin at lists.runrev.com] On Behalf Of Scott Rossi
> Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 2:34 AM
> To: Metacard List; Revolution List
> Subject: [ANN] News Reader Stack Available
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> -----
> 
> - 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
> -----
> E: scott at tactilemedia.com
> W: http://www.tactilemedia.com
> 
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