People who are not computer fanatics often sign onto the Web, wander around for an hour or two—maybe a day or two—but, without something that is, for them, of compelling benefit, their use of the Web either fades away or becomes an "on-demand" activity that takes place when a specific piece of information is required.
Which brings us to the subject of this article. I have found an application that almost everyone can use and, furthermore, almost everyone will want to use. It's called Pointcast.
Pointcast is a service which provides news and information directly to the user on exactly those topics and categories in which the user has indicated an interest. The hidden part of the Pointcast system—by far the largest part, I'm sure—consists of a large server located somewhere on the Web. The visible part is a piece of client software which Pointcast calls the PCN Channel Viewer. You can download the Channel Viewer from Pointcast's Web site. The download and installation process is easy—just follow the instructions.
To use Pointcast, you must have an Internet connection which can be permanent or dial-up. Pointcast supports any Internet Service Provider which assigns a valid IP address (which includes NETCOM, EarthLink, and all the popular providers) plus CompuServe, AOL and the Microsoft Network.
So let's assume you have downloaded and installed the Channel Viewer and you have a valid Internet connection. How do you get started? Start by activating the Viewer.
As shown in Fig. 1, the Viewer consists of a resizable Window containing several panes. The configuration of the panes is somewhat dependent on the category of information you are viewing. The categories are: News, Companies, Weather, Sports, Internet, Industries and Lifestyle. You select which category you want to see by clicking the appropriate tab in the panel at the left side of the Viewer. The category shown in Fig. 1 is the News category which is laid out in a format which is typical of most of the other categories. The main window is divided into three panes: Headlines (which also contains subtopics), the main text area and an advertisement pane.
Initially, of course, since there has been no download of information, the panes are empty. You can choose to update the Viewer immediately, or personalize the information first. Since the download is normally amazingly quick, I suggest you download first and then learn about personalizing once you have seen what's available. To do that, click the Update button.
The Title Bar of the window shows what's going on. At first it displays: Preparing to
Download. If you have not already established your connection to the Internet, PCN will
dial it for you at this time. After a short delay, the Title Bar starts to display such informational
messages as: Downloading National News, Downloading Weather, etc.
Finally, when all the requested data has been downloaded, the Title Bar displays: Last
updated on Saturday, March 23 at 3:02 p.m. (where the date and time are obviously
variable). At this point, if your connection is dial-up, you can actually disconnect from the
Internet if you want.
At this stage, the News window should look much more like Fig. 1. In the Headline pane, four tabs split the News into four categories: National, Politics, International and Business. Within each category the first item is a news summary followed by headlines for each article contained within the category. Clicking on the headline displays the article, which can also be printed by clicking (what else) the Print button. If you click on the pane containing the article, it will expand to occupy the entire data area so you can see more of the article at one time. Clicking again restores the three panes.
A word about the advertising pane. Pointcast is free to the user. The cost is borne by the sponsors whose advertisements play in the advertising pane. To get more detail on an advertisement, click the pane while the appropriate commercial is playing and you will be transferred to the relevant Web site for more information or to place an order. The advertisements are not intrusive and contain an interesting amount of animation, and I have found myself following them through to their Web sites to get more information so, I guess, the theory works.
Under the News tab is the Companies tab. This allows you to follow specific companies from both a financial and a news point of view. To select the companies, click on the Personalize button and select the Companies tab. You can then enter the stock symbol for each company you want to watch and click Add. If you don't know the symbol, a Look Up button allows you to interrogate the Web directly to find it.
Once your companies are selected, Pointcast will supply charts showing the share price and volume throughout the current (or last) trading period, a numeric summary and a constantly moving belt directly from the appropriate stock ticker along the bottom showing the relevant trades. The ticker is deliberately delayed at least 20 minutes. Any press releases or articles which mention the selected company are listed in the headline pane and can be accessed in the same way as the News articles.
Below Companies is Weather.
The Weather layout is a little different. A large pane shows a continuously scrolling list of
selected cities giving Highs, Lows and a brief description for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.
Below this is the ubiquitous advertising pane and a map pane showing the National Weather
map, Today's Highs, Tonight's Lows, the Ray Ban UV Index, Doppler Radar, and a Satellite
Image. You can scroll through the maps horizontally using the displayed right and left arrow
buttons. If you position the mouse over the main pane, the pointer becomes a small hand which,
when you press the mouse button, allows you to pull the scrolling page up or down.
Interestingly, the direction of subsequent movement will follow the last direction you pulled the
pane. Someone has worked a lot on this interface!
The next topic in order is Sports. Although sports is really not my thing and, when I first loaded Pointcast I did not select any sports topics, I later realized that I do, in fact, follow football and hockey is a half-hearted kind of way. So I selected NFL, College Football and NHL from the list supplied in the Personalize dialog. This works in the same way as the News category and, to my surprise, I did find the articles quite interesting so I now peruse the Sports News, too. Who knows? Perhaps a whole new view of life will open up as a result of Pointcast.
The Internet button displays a fairly simplistic Web Browser with a Home Page button that links you to Pointcast's home page, interesting in its own right, with links to search engines, reference points and information about Pointcast. While I wouldn't recommend this as the best browser for your everyday Web use, it is adequate and is a smart inclusion to make the Channel Viewer complete.
The Industries button displays a "news-format" screen which contains, by default, a tab showing charts and numerical summaries for all the major exchanges and indexes. After that, you can use the Personalize dialog to select from a large list of industries from Advertising to Utilities. Each selection results in a tab in the headline pane containing a list of articles oriented to the specific industry.
The final category is Lifestyle, which combines a news-format tab with a tab for Horoscopes (you use Personalize to select the appropriate signs). You can even choose to display the latest results for your local state lottery.
All in all, I have found the application to be both fascinating and useful. While the home page offers "Bucks for Bugs" (this is a Beta-release, after all), I haven't found any. I update at least once a day and enjoy skimming the headlines in each category to see what interests me. Each time, I inevitably I find a number of articles I want to read in-depth.
One last goodie—the Channel Viewer comes with a built-in screen saver, which it obligingly installs for you. This comes to life and displays an attractive mix of the commercials and article headlines, seemingly at random and constantly changing. Click on any item while it is displayed, and PCN takes you straight to the article or Web page so that you can view the complete information.
Like the Viewer itself, the screen saver is attractive, and Pointcast should be congratulated on a well-designed and innovative product which, presumably, will be a success for its creators, while providing value to the customer and more validation for the Web itself. I plan to use the product for a long time to come.