Whether Safari is the fastest browser is not particularly important. Each of these browsers is fast – certainly faster than the current version of Firefox and of Internet Explorer – but a few milliseconds shaved off the page-loading time is probably not going to affect most of us all that much. A much more appealing selling point for Safari (if you can have a selling point for a browser which is given away) is the new Reader feature. Safari Reader gives you distraction-free reading in your browser.

When you surf to a site which Safari senses contains an article, a small Reader icon appears at the right of the address bar. Click that icon, and you’ll be presented with the article in its entirety, minus ads and other clutter. Reader is smart enough to sense when an article extends for more than one web page and it presents such articles in a single, clean view. No more having to click through multiple pages.

Reader isn’t perfect. For example, on the Geekgirl’s site, which is built using blogging software, it can’t always tell where one article ends and another begins, so you’ll sometimes be presented with a long series of articles in one view. But mostly, it works well and if you’re like me, you’ll relish getting to read articles without dealing with flashing video ads and other intrusions.

If you hover your mouse pointer over the bottom of an article displayed in Reader, a set of controls will appear. Using them, you can zoom in or out, email or print the web page, and exit from Reader. You can also exit by clicking the Reader button once more to return to the full web page.

A readable web without Safari

While Safari is the first browser to provide a built-in article reader, it’s not the first app to make web pages easier to read. There are a bunch of sites and services doing the same thing. My favourite is Readability. Using Readability in any browser, you can select the style, size and margins and have any web page re-displayed beautifully. It will even turn links within a page into footnotes. Readability’s implementation is cleaner than Safari’s and more flexible, but you need to add a bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar to be able to use it.

A similar, and similarly named, app is Readable. It uses a bookmarklet as Readability does, and offers even more flexibility in the formatting of pages.

Related posts:

1. Five free online office tools
2. Get yourself a better browser
3. The Kindle and the Sony Reader toe-to-toe

But, let’s face it, the Kindle is better in bed. At least, it is when it comes to reading books.

I’ve been reading ebooks in bed first with the original Sony Reader, then with the next-gen Reader, the original Kindle, the second-gen Kindle and, now, the iPad. The iPad is lousy in bed.

Why? Because it’s too heavy and too slippery. Unless you’re the type who reads sitting propped up against pillows, you’re going to find the iPad an uncomfortable bedmate.

Reading with the Kindle is pretty much like reading a small paperback book. It’s light in the hands and the absence of backlighting makes it easy on the eyes, too.

Reading in bed with the iPad, on the other hand, is more like reading a hardback or, at least, a Robert Ludlum paperback. After a while, you’ll find your hands going numb, and although you can adjust the lighting level and the colour of the page, the backlighting takes its toll if you read for more than an hour or so. I also defy anyone to use a cover-less iPad in bed for any length of time. That beautiful shiny tablet slips around in your hands, providing no purchase. You’ll definitely need to slip it into a cover and that adds a few more ounces to its weight.

What the iPad does well in bed

Despite these drawbacks, there are several pluses to the in-bed experience with the iPad. The backlighting is handy if you wake in the middle of the night and want to read without turning on a light. You’ll want to drop the brightness down to read in the dark, especially if you don’t want to disturb your partner, but it’s much easier using the iPad in this way than trying to read a Kindle with a book light attached.

There’s also the delight of being able to read all sorts of stuff on the iPad while you’re in bed. You’re not limited to books: surf the web, read The New York Times, catch up with your favourite RSS feeds, do a crossword. It’s all at your fingertips with the iPad; not so with the Kindle.

But the iPad’s weight really is a drag and it makes all the difference. If you’re tossing up between the Kindle and the iPad because you’re primarily interested in reading ebooks, the bedtime experience is one good reason to go with the Kindle.

Related posts:

1. Hands on with the Kindle and the Sony Reader
2. Kindle and the limitations of the Whispernet
3. In bed with the Kindle and Sony Reader

You see, I suffer from simulator sickness, a type of motion sickness induced by 3D virtual environments.

I’m not alone as a sufferer. Studies indicate that up to 60 percent of fighter pilots suffer from at least one symptom of simulation sickness when training on simulators, and these are people who’ve been handpicked for resistance to such a reaction. There haven’t been many studies of the broader population, but some research points to 80 percent of the population being affected to some degree. For some of the sufferers, the symptoms are mild: a little dizziness after playing a 3D game for a couple of hours; a touch of nausea; eyestrain. For others, like me, the effects can be dramatic and longlasting.

Traditional wisdom has been that simulator sickness strikes when the visual motor cues you receive don’t jibe with the physical motor cues. The folk over at the Human Interface Technology Lab (HITLab), think that may not be the case. They suggest that it’s not the conflicting motion cues that are the problem, but rather the conflicting stationary cues. Our brains search for consistent stationary objects in a scene to provide stability; when those objects (known as ‘rest frames’) are absent or changing, things can get scrambled in your head.

A new class of disabled

The computing world is increasingly first-person, 3D. Take a look at the top 50 games. Check out the popularity of 3D online worlds, such as Second Life. Surf the research sites of Microsoft and other software developers. 3D environments abound. In games, 3D designs dominate almost to the exclusion of other, less immersive interfaces.

Now, if suffering from simulator sickness meant nothing more than being excluded from playing Myst or Halo, it’d be a shame, but certainly not calamitous. The trouble is, that’s just the start.

Take Second Life. It’s partly a game, yes. It’s also an experiment in where the web is heading. That’s why companies are setting up shop within the virtual world; it’s why some organisations hold meetings and training sessions there. And you can bet that as our hardware gets more powerful and the software more refined, online 3D environments will start appearing with increasing regularity.

The same thing is happening with operating systems and general applications. Wander over to Microsoft Research – one of the most interesting parts of the Microsoft site, by the way – and you’ll find a bunch of projects based on 3D manipulation and technologies.

Those games developers who show any awareness of simulator sickness tend to shunt the problem aside. It’s too much work to find a solution and, after all, “no-one’s making them play the game”.

But what happens when it’s not a game? What happens when your company announces it’s holding staff meetings in Second World from now on? Or when Microsoft or Apple release an immersive operating system? Then it’s no longer a matter of “tough luck, you can’t play”; it becomes a matter of disability. If the limited research so far is correct about the number of people likely to be affected, the ranks of the virtually disabled will be huge.

Locked out

All up, I spent about 25 hours in Second Life. I knew it was too long but I felt I had to do it because I’d been commissioned to write an article about the online world for Australian PC User.

After a 20-minute stint in Second Life, I’d feel sick. But 20 minutes isn’t nearly enough time to explore the world, so I’d dive back in for longer to do more research. Even though I broke those 25 hours of virtual experience into smaller chunks, by the time I’d completed my article I had experienced severe nausea, headaches, eyestrain, disorientation, and dizziness which didn’t dissipate entirely for almost a month. Second Life is a fascinating place, but I won’t be returning. I just hope I won’t be locked out of more and more of the digital landscape. I hope you won’t be, either.

No related posts.

I’ve been writing such reviews since the early 1980s, when dBASE was top dog in the database stakes. It was a seriously buggy program, but in the very early ’80s it was one of the very few choices for anyone wanting a PC database. Then, around 1983-1984, there was an explosion of such applications. Over a period of 18 months, I wrote reviews of 14 database products in a series of articles called ‘The Great Database Search’.

You won’t find 14 serious desktop database contenders these days, and you won’t find many of the products I wrote about back in 1984: dBASE is still in existence, entirely transformed, and Dataflex has morphed into Visual Dataflex. They’re both very much developer tools; not the sort of thing a home user or small office manager would choose for managing data.

Although the number of desktop databases has declined, the quality of the products available has steadily improved. When I sat down to compare Microsoft Access 2007, FileMaker Pro 9 and Alpha Five version 8, I found myself hard pressed to pick an overall ‘winner’. These are all excellent tools. My sense is, after all these years, desktop databases have finally come of age.

I’ll post the full review online once it’s been published in Australian PC User, but if you’re currently thinking about buying a database, here are my recommendations:

Buy FileMaker Pro 9 if:

• You have little database experience and no-one to whom you can farm out the job.
• You want to get up and running as quickly as possible.
• You have modest database needs, with expectations of moderate growth.
• You want to be able to create databases which run on the Mac and Windows and the Web (in the latter case, you’ll need FileMaker Pro Advanced).
• You don’t find the price tag offputting ($US299 for FileMaker Pro; $US499 for FileMaker Pro Advanced).

Buy Alpha Five version 8 if:

• You have some database or programming experience, or access to someone who has, or you’re prepared to devote a slice of time to absorbing all that’s on offer.
• You have modest to quite complex database needs, believe you may need to scale up your database applications in the future, or need to access data in SQL databases (for which you’ll require the Professional version, not the cheaper Desktop version).
• You want to publish your data on the web (you’ll need the Professional version for this, too).

Buy Access 2007 if:

• You need serious database power, or
• You need to buy at least a couple of other Microsoft Office 2007 components (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel, Publisher). In that case, because Access 2007 is bundled with Office 2007 Professional it becomes a very inexpensive option ($US499 for the whole suite, but chances are you’ll qualify for the upgrade pricing of $US329).

There’s another alternative to consider: Base, the database component included with the freeware OpenOffice.org. This is a relational database which handles DBF (the old dBASE format) files as well as SQL data (SQL is the industry standard for corporate databases). It has wizards for creating tables, forms and reports. It lacks the sophistication and advanced tools you’ll find in the other database management systems, but you can’t argue with the price. If you have previous database experience and don’t mind winging it (the documentation is sparse and you’ll come across some bugs in the system), it’s certainly worth a try.

Related posts:

1. Which database series should I read?
2. A database dictionary
3. Databasics II: Creating your first database