| Notice how
little of the window is taken up with borders and controls?
Before switching to Cyberdog, I used to be frustrated
at the amount of usable space a browser/e-mailer/newsreader
subtracted from the meaningful portion of a display--there's
not that much to start with on a 15" monitor! And Cyberdog's
look is simple and expansive, not distracting.
With the e-mail and newsreader parts,
Cyberdog can create multiple mail trays, handle--or
"filter"--the mail in all your trays (including the
trash tray), and display lists in more ways than you
might be used to. And its endlessly customizable letterheads
can serve many purposes, in addition to the obvious
one of saving favorite embedded graphics for repeated
use. The search engine is incredibly fast--if you're
looking for a word or string of words somewhere hidden
within six hundred entire messages spread among all
your mail trays, you can do it easily. (I just timed
that operation on my mail trays; on my Power Macintosh
7200/90, it took 3 seconds--tops.)
Cyberdog is quite a bit more stable than
the other popular browsers I've used, though it's not
perfect. Before switching to Cyberdog, I rarely got
beyond half an hour without a quit or a hang; now I
get to decide when I'm getting off the Internet! I routinely
run Cyberdog for four or five hours at a time. I don't
mean to claim that Cyberdog is a nearly perfect browser;
it just comes much closer to perfect for me than anything
else. There are two serious deficiencies, as well as
some other shortcomings which could be improved. One
serious difficulty occurs in the handling of JavaScript
web pages; this problem is expected to be remedied when
the Blake beta, a Cyberdog "part" which Kantara Development
is working on, becomes available. Blake is in pre-release
now, and shows good promise. The other serious problem
is in the downloading of newsgroups and web pages for
offline reading; Cyberdog is not set up to do this directly.
There are workarounds, but they are less satisfactory
than a menu choice would be. And unfortunately--because
of the tight integration of Cyberdog's newsgroup reader
with the e-mailer part--it's not practical to upgrade
the newsreader without access to the Cyberdog source
code.
(concluded on page
3)
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