Maxthon/MyEI2 Groups
I have mentioned the topic of groups a few times, let me elaborate. Maxthon (used to be called MyIE2) is a shell around IE. You can open a whole load of web pages as tabs (no suprises there). As I go through my RSS feeds I click away on links of interest and probably end up with 20-30 articles I want to read, I then Click GROUPS – SAVE AS GROUP, and it generates a file of links.
I then either wait for a robocopy autosync to my tablet or click a shortcut and the group file gets copied to my Tablet within seconds. I Open the group on the tablet (two clicks) and all the files are downloaded and ready to browse offline (one tab each).
Tonight I took my eldest out for Tea and we watched the sunset over the sea, I read my web pages and she read a novel as we snacked. I ended up with 3 web sites I wanted to blog about and a few others I wanted to research so I saved these as Net Snippets. I also clicked on maybe 10 other follow up links which created tabs but obviously didn’t resolve because I had no network. I saved these as a group, (called tablet). When I got back home my Tablet and desktop just sync in the background and I have all my net snippets on both machines (effectively my research archive). I then have the option of opening the Group of web pages I saved as tablet on either my tablet or my Desktop (because the group has synced), and this time (I am on the net now) they will resolve and be ready for my next reading session. Of course I can keep adding additional web sites to these groups, create new groups, create groups on particular topics like special offers from shops or ebay searches and use the same technique.
In summary – Tabs and groups, thats why I use Maxthon and not IE and also why I don’t use Firefox which is nearly as good but not quite at the same working practice.
If I had an always on network things would be even slicker. By the way lots of the same ideas work with movies, music, ebooks, pdf files etc.
I found this post via Scoble’s link blog.
I too am a heavy tab user in Maxthon (on a tablet pc, no less), and it’s refreshing to read something like this. I was originally a Netscape user, where I first discovered tabs, but had since moved to MyIE2, then Maxthon. Recently, I’ve also been trying to use Opera and Firefox. I have no real preference, only certain features I need: easy gestures to open a link in a new tab and close a tab, the ability to open unlimited tabs, built-in search bar, and preferrably, all text-boxes play nicely with the TIP (tablet input panel, for non-tablet-ers out there). In Firefox, you can fit in a limite number of tabs before they start opening in the unreachable no-man’s land beyond the right edge of the window. I haven’t tried opening as many in Opera, but they get very small, to the point that you can’t even see a fragment of the title or icon. Ultimately, I’ve had my best experience with Maxthon, however, all three are prone to crashing at times, and Firefox doesn’t back-up my tabs. I’d really like to see a low resource, multi-tab browser with a tree-like tab interface. This means that you’d be able to open links from a specific page in a section under that page’s tab, or if you’re reasearching something, keep all the tabs on that topic in a sub-section. This would make researching and blog-browsing much easier, I think. What do you think?
Julian
http://thewayofthespoon.blogspot.com