I have complained, both here and on the Start.com blog, about Start.com’s stubborn refusal to support the Mac platform – this is a short-sighted move on Microsoft’s part as they appear simply to be “preaching to the converted” rather than trying to win new customers.
In any case, it didn’t matter too much for me, as there was always the alternative from Google which works perfectly on the Mac (although it might not be as pretty!).
Thanks to Loic though I stumbled across Netvibes.com’s offering today and I am well impressed (see below).
Hard to see from the image but Netvibes allows you to customise the title of your page – in a bold stroke of originality I decided to call mine “Tom’s Title!” One day soon I’ll get an imagination!
More usefully though, the site displays feed content in boxes which can be re-arranged around the screen – similar to Google (and allegedly similar to Start.com!) – these content boxes can include content from your own feeds. I imported my opml file and added my feed from this site to the bottom right hand side of the page, for instance.
Also, Google is unable to display the weather for Cork – Netvibes wins out on this score giving a four day forecast for the region.
Netvibes allows you to sign in so that you can view your customised Netvibes page from any location.
Finally, Netvibes allows you to read your Gmail – see the top left hand side of the image for my Gmail account!
The only downside of Netvibes is that it is not yet working in Safari but as Firefox is my browser of choice on the Mac, this matters little to me (I prefer Firefox ‘cos it warns me if I am about to close a window with multiple tabs open – I can’t tell you how many times this has saved me!).
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
To receive a warning when closing multiple in safari: http://www.ocdev.com/
start.com has a lot more functionality (a lot of it useless eye candy) than netvibes. You can change the number of columns (handy for large resolutions), change the overall colour style (how innovative!), and the show/hide main menu is pinnable or hidable. The weather widget is AJAXified and can have more than one entry. The whole mouseover for panel options on netvibes is annoying and hard to use. start.com has constant buttons that dont disappear onmouseout.
However, you can’t give the page your own title. The drag’n'drop is a little clunky. You must use MSN search (surprise, surprise).
More on request.
Lee,
excellent – thanks for all the info – btw, does the weather widget in Start.com give Irish weather info?
“does the weather widget in Start.com give Irish weather info?”
Yes, powered by the Weather Channel.
>>I have complained, both here and on the Start.com blog, about Start.com’s stubborn refusal to support the Mac platform
Yeah, kind of like how Apple really jumped immediately on iTunes and iPod support for windows user? Go run virtual PC.
Um, no. I have Virtual PC on this Mac and it is a complete dog of an application – every action in it takes at least 2-3 minutes.
So, why would I want to run it to see Start.com when there are perfectly good alternatives like Netvibes.com and Google’s google.com/ig which run fine on the Mac?
Thanks Tom, I prefer that to google ig or start.com
No Problem – good to see you back blogging after your summer break
Keep it up.
Tom.
These Ajaxian Portals are better than a small pot
.
I found one recently called ProtoPage which is handy for jotting down links etc., it has a nice “sticky note” feature and also it does not impose a table layout (see http://www.protopage.com).
My favourite so far is http://www.start.com and now http://www.netvibes.com (thanks) is a close second. Very disappointed with Google’s attempt
.
John,
One or two of your links were broken in your comment so I edited them to fix them, I hope you don’t mind.
I posted earlier today about Ajax office applications – a word processor, an Ajax spreadsheet, etc.
Ajax is hitting the bigtime!
No proplem!, I hit the Submit button without checking the preview (doh!). I figured you’d sort it.
See also generic AJAX stuff at ajaxpatterns.org
Is there an issue with Netvibes on Firefox? It seems I get server errors when trying to click ‘edit’ for each area (eg to add my Gmail login details).
As a result everytime I need to customise my page I have to use IE, then log back in using Firefox.
Also does anyone know how to add gmail to Start.com?
I also can’t edit Netvibes in Firefox and have to edit in IE. I hope there is a fix on the way! If there is a trick to it, please let me know.
anyone knows the provider of the weather in netvibes.com
the name is “the Weather Channel”
but when i google there are so many with this name.
is there a way to use the wheather module from netvibes on my own website?