Wednesday, 9. September 2009, 22:24:27
You may say: what a philosophic question. But is it? (
) I personally feel that speed dial was invented to speed up a browsing in multiple ways.
Long time ago, there was an empty page, or some home page, that was showed (and loaded) after browser start-up/tab opening. You needed additional typing/clicking in order to get to the page you wanted to go to, when you started your browser. With speed dial you have menu of your favorite pages that can be accessed by just on more click. Now you may say: "the same thing is offered to me by bookmarks/multiple link panels in my browser. So what is the added value of the speed dial?" The added thing are those tiny previews of the pages. By refreshing whole speed dial you will see what is new in those pages. Well, their title pages at least. This way, your browsing is sped up, so you don't need to browse to all pages, you want to visit. It is some kind of visual RSS
Customization of the speed dial is very popular these days. Winners of
the contest showed us some very nice looking speed dials. Most of them removed the functionality i was speaking above in favor of design. And I have to say, they did great job
You don't have preview of the pages, but you have very good looking browser home-page
Recently I've played with my speed dial. After reading couple of tips from
tamil and creation of my custom thumbnails, finally I have very nice speed dial.
Background is a wallpaper from
WoW, thumbnails of iGoogle, gmail and tweeter are taken from
WOFall Skin of the speed dial is based on the WOFall's
speed dial clean skin. I've just replaced the speeddial-selected with an empty transparent .png image.
So what was this all about? Well, it was all just the philosophic monologue to introduce my speed dial
.
Or was it? Well, at least there is a new wish aimed to the developers: provide the speed dial with at hover tooltip containing page preview
WIDGETIZE