Web viewer widget?

B

boognish

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I could have sworn when I first checked out promotions for OS X leopard a couple of years ago, it talked about a widget in the dashboard that displayed manually specified web pages (not web clip) a page at a time with a spinning cube effect like when clicking to view the next page in a powerpoint presentation
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Does anyone know if anything like that exists? There's about 15 different news sites I like to quickly browse through everyday, would be nice to use something a bit slicker and faster than bookmarks in safari. Web clip is useless, it takes up loads of memory with lots of clipped pages, and there isn't enough space to fit all the content onto one screen
 
Have you considered RSS as a way to track those sites? If you don't find the widget its a good alternative.
 
Yeah I've tried RSS, set up a bunch of RSS feeds from regular news sites on mail.app. The thing I found was, I'd barely checked the new incoming feeds, and they just piled up unread, then when I remembered, there was so much to trawl through, it felt like more of a chore then I light entertaining read, not to mention most of it being slightly outdated current affairs, with many being repeat stories from the different publications. What I like about viewing the homepage's of news sites is their visually editorialised, with the prominence put on the bigger, generally more interesting stories. Its designed so I can scan the page as quickly and efficiently as possible, in a visually interesting and engaging way. With RSS, I'm flooded with pure content, every single homepage story, not that visually engaging, and with no quick way to differentiate, which I then have to acknowledge and psychically mark as read. I can't mentally sieve through large amounts of information in a relatively short period of time, like I can when viewing the actual sites. I'd just like to visit the sites in a quicker and more convenient way.

If there isn't a widget out there, I'm quite tempted to build one with that apple widget kit when I have time. Presumedly it wouldn't be too difficult. The spinning cube thing would be a bit tricky, but thats not as important I guess. Just thought I'd seen this in a OS X Leopard video promotion on the Apple site a while before it was released.
 
Well I can understand that, i have to carefully prune my rss subscriptions to prevent overload. Its normally 10 mins a morning to scan the sites I follow (90 odd). I woudl reccomend using a real rss reader rather than mail though, NetNewsWire is the best and also now free.

Widget wise. I can find Browsers like this, this and this. The last seems like it might be small enough mem-wise for having several versions running for different sites.

There are also widgets to just tell you when a site is updated and let you go broese it yourself such as this and this. Sadly I canl;t find exactly what you are describing.

If you write it yourself, let us know :). Also, I think the cube effect is a part of CoreImage or one of the other inbuilt services of OS X, so it might be not so difficult to implement, but I am no programmer so don;t take my word for it.
 
Thanks very much for the help. The site update widget will be particularly helpful. The browser widgets don't seem to have bookmarking, so can't use them for flicking between sites conveniently unfortunately. Will stick with Safari for now, I just right click my "News" Bookmark folder and click open in tabs, does the trick. Will let you know if I get round to making a widget, would be a cool feature to have :) If anyone see's a widget similar to what I'm after, let me know!
 
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