Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[Edited in response to a comment from Snap.com]

Okay, I gave that Snap Shots doohickey on Livejournal a fair trial (since whenever it was that they added it, what, a month and a half ago?), and the results are mixed but the end result is that it ain't worth the bother.

I did like being able to get a quick glimpse of where inadequately described links would take me before going so far as to open a whole 'nuther tab -- and let's face it, an awfully large percentage of the links one stumbles across in random blog-reading are not very clear about what type of content is on the other end (only, if you're lucky, the general subject). Seeing a video play box in the preview popup, when sitting at a computer that doesn't handle videos, was useful (especially if I didn't recognize the URL as being for a video-sharing site) -- don't open that; copy the URL to the "look at this from a different computer later" file. Previewing something where the link text and the URL were both vague, so I could see whether the destination was random graphical fluff or something that looked like it might contain meaningful information was also nice.

Waiting forever for the preview once I had enough tabs open for the computer to be somewhat RAM-starved ... not so fun. Having the pop-up start to form and obscure what I was reading because I scrolled and a link rolled under the mouse cursor, or waiting to see which would come up first, the Snap popup or the browser's URL-tooltip that I really wanted to see, also got old quickly.

Funny thing, though: with Snap Shots enabled, links had that, uh, speech-bubble-with-shiny-marks symbol after them, and I kept thinking that icon should have been the activator, so I could choose whether to make the popup appear by mousing over the symbol, or go straight to doing normal link-stuff without the popup by going to the link text itself like normal, instead. This would reduce the chances of accidental activation, avoid forcing a wait for the popup before getting the right-click menu to appear, and basically Put The User In Control.

But that's not how it worked, so I've given up and turned it off. On one computer anyhow. I'm going to have to either set the "blocked content" filter on each machine I surf from as I wind up using each, or I'm going to have to instruct my name server to screw with requests for Snap's servers. The latter doesn't seem quite right from a "how the Internet works" perspective, but since I am but a leaf on the 'net it won't affect anyone but myself and my houseguests -- and it does seem to be one convenience of running my own nameserver instead of having each machine connect to my ISP's nameserver. (The other big convenience, and the reason I set it up this way, is being able to maintain the names/addresses of all the computers in the house without having to edit the hosts file on each computer separately.)

Too bad they designed LJ configured the activation control in a way that made the entire feature all-or-nothing^[1]. OTOH, they won't get a chance to sneak ads in on me this way.

[1] Note explanation provided by Erik Wingren of Snap.com in a comment to the LiveJournal copy of this entry.