Friday, January 1, 2010

“Readability” Rocks


Happy New Year everyone.  I was just reading the New York Times 5th Annual Pogie Awards (by David Pogue) for the best new tech ideas, and came across one that is actually useful to those of us who read a lot of text online.  It's called Readability, and it is free and easy to install.  You just go to their site and drop the app into your browser's bookmarks bar.  Here's Pogue's description:

The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it at lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away.
You wind up with a simple, magazine-like layout, presented in a beautiful font and size (your choice) against a white or off-white background with none of this red-text-against-black business.
You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn’t handle right — no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.

Try it, you'll love it, or at least I do.

No comments:

Post a Comment