Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

One of the great secrets of Britain's online world is the CIX online service. Like the US-based WELL, this is an online discussion forum, based around the venerable COSY conferencing software. It's an excellent online community, full of interesting and intelligent people. The development of offline readers meant that it was possible to quickly "blink" online, pull down messages and then post replies. In the days of modems and long distance phone calls to an ISP or bulletin board this was a good thing, and kept costs to a minimum...

I've used CIX for many years now, and find it a fun place to spend online time. But there's one big problem, a lack of up to date OLRs. While I currently use AMEOL on the PC, the next version has been in a closed beta for well over a year. marypcb's choice Virtual Access has just been open sourced, and most of us are waiting for codepope to finish writing Augur...

I'm planning to do our Worldcon trip using just the iBook, so have been looking out for a Mac OS X tool. Luckily codepope pointed me at Parlance, a recent development - a brand new CIX OLR for the Mac that is designed for OS X.

So, now I can do pretty much everything I want on the iBook. I rather like this idea.

But it needs more stickers.