newsAlert 
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What's New
- Version 0.4 released.
- Version 0.3 in limited testing.
Other Stuff
Abstract
Today, an increasing number of people are watching 24 hour a day cable news
networks which provide up to the minute news alerts. However, many
netizens do not
have access to a television. Instead, we watch the home pages of
cnn, foxnews, or
one of the many other news portals for breaking news. This allows anyone with
a net connection to be informed of critical changes in our world.
However, using a browser to access breaking news has some problems. One major
problem is that you must continually stop what you are doing
and check to see if there is any breaking news. In other word, the burden of
checking for breaking news is on you. This user driven interrupt is quite
unnatural.
Consider commerical television. When a viewer watches their favorite show,
they are still tied into the news broadcast system. Since 1963, breaking
news stories have interrupted U.S. commercial television. Intially used
for the President of the U.S. announcements, this system was extend to
include many other important news alerts.
News notification while using a web browser should have a similar experience. The
newsAlert project stems from the idea that breaking news
stories should display an immediate notification to the user. This
will put web browsing on equal footing as the television and radio for critial
news notifications.
How it works
newsAlert periodically checks selected news services such as
cnn or foxnews
for breaking news. When we find such a story, a dialog is displayed with the
contents of the story.
If you like to know more, please read the developer documention. Coming soon.
Why newsAlerts
- newsAlert does not need the news site to participate. There is no special file that the news service has to maintain.
- newsAlert is not tied to a news site nor does it want to promote anything. You choose where you get your news from.
- newsAlert is extensible. Adding addtional news site providers easy.
- newsAlert is a simple example of how to extend mozilla's functionality.
- newsAlert is recommended by 9 out of 10 Golf Pros.
The newsalert project can be contacted through the mailing list or the member list.
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