Tag Archive for 'previews'

Snap - previews, if you must

snapWith the advent of approximately 2 million web-services a day catering to website and blog owners, it’s really quite difficult to find that one needle in a haystack that will actually make the cut and be useful to at least one person.

I mean, it’s really quite interesting: Loads and loads of companies are now developing things called “widgets”, which, only by copying and pasting a few lines of code, should enrich your website with all sorts of shenanigans. Picture slide-shows, embedded video, picture slide-shows, weather forecast, embedded calendars. Oh, and picture slide-shows. Hell, they even had a whole conference dedicated to widgets. And ultimately picture-slideshows.

Since my desire to display rotating images to my website’s visitors is rather limited, I’ve never really been too interested in that stuff. Well, until I saw an article about Snap (here)

Snap, originally a search engine I honestly hadn’t heard about before (I mean, seriously, Search! When there’s Google around), have now finally convinced me to use (part of) their service. What they do? Well, hover over one of the links on this page and you’ll see!

Correct, they automatically fetch a preview thumbnail of the link’s target, then display it right then and there. And all of that just by pasting three lines of code somewhere into this blog’s template. So, this is what Snap does, and this is something l like.

Not more, not less.

Browster - not for everyone

Browster offers previews of search results. Doesn’t sound too exciting, but enough so to warrant a little testing. Unfortunately, even though they are not much more than a browser extension (which in Firefox usually is a platform independent affair), they offer their services only to Windows using folk. Which I’m simply not.

But they seem to have a good marketing division, who’ve devised a devilish scheme to disguise their shortcomings:

browster dual installer

How great is that? A single download file for two browsers. And it’s an .exe file too! What a sales pitch! Not compatible with a large chunk of the early adopter crowd, but no need to click download twice when choosing to install in two different browsers (which is the most obvious thing a mainstream-user does with a new service, right?).

So I guess Valleywag are right after all. Browster is a dog, or at least just as useful as a dog when it comes to providing services for your non-Windows surfing experience.




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