A Keynian takes three hours of work to buy a Big Mac in his country, while an American can afford one with only ten minutes of work. This analysis based on its Big Mac Index, appears in latest edition of The Economist. Its a really effective illustration of the disparities in today’s world — much better than, say, the per capita income, as a measure of differences in the standard of living.
After my previous post on the erstwhile Spaces aggregator among others, its creator Diego Duval left a comment asking why it didnt work for me. I realised that I had been playing around with an old version, with the project even having a new name in the meanwhile.
Since Diego cared enough to leave a comment, I thought the least I could do is give it another shot. So off I went to CleverCactus and downloaded the latest beta.
I’ve always thought that the product has a very interesting concept, in terms of being an “information aggregator” rather than just an RSS aggregator. The new version looks good, works well. Goes through proxies without a problem. Displays html pretty well. So it didn’t have any of the issues that had put me off earlier.
But after using it for a while, I found something interesting. Earlier, I thought I wanted a three pane view, which is one reason I liked the NetNewsWire screenshots. However, I now find that I actually prefer the two pane view much more, because it allows me to scan very quickly which article I want to read. Scrolling through individual items in a three pane view is much more time consuming when I want to read the details of only a few of the articles in a feed. Time.. the killer app!
So I’ll keep checking out on the status of CleverCactus since I find its concept pretty cool, but for now, I’ll do with NewsMonster. Maybe someday, when i am willing to trade in my mail and NNTP clients for CleverCactus, I might go back to using it.