Pointcast Network

The PointCast Network -- The PointCast Network (PCN) exemplifies all that is good and bad on the Internet. The good -- PCN delivers free to your desktop timely and relevant information in the form of stock updates, sports scores, weather forecasts, news feeds, industry analyses, and more. PCN offers a variety of customizable options that allow you to personalize the app within a framework of nine general categories -- sports, stocks, business news, general news, weather, lifestyle (including entertainment, horoscope, and lottery news), the Internet, national and political news, and international news. PCN includes a scheduling agent and an extensive configuration manager for personalizing the service to your needs. An extremely cool screen saver is another of PointCast's strong points -- the screen saver rotates between all of the above features so that you can get the latest scores, news clippings, and stock quotes without even having to touch your keyboard. The PCN interface has been developed from the ground up to be efficient and intuitive for all users, from novice to 'net adept. An iconic hand allows you to change the direction and speed of stock and score tickers as well as to quickly find the company or game that is most important to you at the moment. Clicking on news clippings gives you a full screen view of the news report, saving needless keystrokes in the process. While not a true newsreader per se, PCN offers more important news than you'll find in your daily newspaper and does so with an interface that is easier and also more enjoyable to use. Even better, PCN now offers seamless integration with Netscape Navigator as well as the ability to function as a Netscape plug-in module. So if all this is the good news, what could be the bad news? PCN has one negative aspect that parallels the 'net with amazing similarities -- both are adept at sucking up your time. Hours can easily be whittled away with PCN, but unlike the Internet, PointCast offers several features designed to help you maximize the information available to you with a minimal loss of time. Every category with news feeds has a summary report which briefly lists all the clippings currently available. This allows you to quickly find the articles important to you, jump to the relevant articles, and then move on. Still, it would be even more efficient if each summary header included a hypertext link to the relevant article. PCN could also be made faster by only updating new information when it conducts its updating procedure. Currently, information is downloaded regardless of whether it has been loaded before, which results in considerably longer delays in receiving new information. Also like the 'net, PCN can be dreadfully slow for those with slow connections. PCN attempts to resolve this problem by storing static information (like advertisements) on your hard drive. Unfortunately, PCN is currently available only as a 16-bit Windows release; my condolences go out to the many Mac and Unix users (and those awaiting a native 32-bit release) who will not be able to use this amazing application. Overall, while PointCast is far from being the consummate application, it may well be the best I've seen to date. Pros: Tons of features, easy customization, impressive design and excellent interface, free news feeds Cons: Limited to a 16-bit Windows release, could benefit from a speed infusion New: Integration with Netscape (plug-in support) and Time Warner's Pathfinder, more Version Reviewed: 1.00 Official Release Date of Review: 6/23/96 Reviewer: Forrest Stroud