Dave Balmer

I haven’t really played with the “Wii” much since we got it last year, and only recently enabled the built-in wifi, so this sweet news viewer has been lurking in my living room for quite a while.

Spin the globe and see news story pages pile up on cities where they happen. Zoom in, and the piles break up into several smaller stacks. The whole interface is fun, smooth and delightful (a user interface cliche that I tend to eschew in favor of less emphatic adjectives, like “cool” and “neat”).

Out-of-browser experiences like this are getting better. Aside from the mild annoyance of downloading some specialized client, the end result is often worth it. Another one I was turned on to recently is CoolIris. It’s a downloadable that turns YouTube and your photo streams into a more channel-like experience. Very interesting.