My first impression: Nice. No more eye strain, no more need to kill all those zombie popups, no more waiting forever while the site builds all those popups. Huzzah!
It's a much more leisurely approach to the news; the kind of thing that harkens back to the old days, when people actually settled down with a cup of coffee and the morning paper. The kind of thing you'd expect to see in an ad for a iPad, if those ads showed people reading the iGlobe on the way to work on the iRed Line.
Is it worth $3.99 a week (what they'll start charging Oct. 1)? Hard for me to say, since we already get the Sunday paper, which includes online access (for only $3.50 a week; go figure). What do you think?
Couple of nits: My password didn't seem to work, but instead of just giving me a box to enter my e-mail address for a replacement, it invited me to chat with somebody. No. I hate chatting; that's why I'm a semi-hermit. Just give me a box to enter my address, please (Steve Garfield actually investigates; finds an answer, sort of).
The related story links at the bottom of stories aren't particularly related - all the metro stories had a link to a story about the death of some former Paraguayan strongman. And while it's nice to let stories breathe, all those links at the bottom of each story are huge and have tons of white space, which makes you have to scroll repeatedly to see them all. Seems kind of dumb. Also, will be interesting to see if the Globies actually start embedding links in stories, since it seems like all their links are black, which works fine in a box that's obviously a menu but not in a story made up of black text. The "Save" thing that pops up everywhere is annoying, at least to those of us who know how to use bookmarks.
More important stuff: Where's the breaking news, the stuff that's happening right now, too late to make it into the dead-trees edition? Am I going to have to click over to boston.com for that?
For the Web geeks, Joshua Benton explains some of the technology behind the new site. Dan Kennedy explains how all that geeky stuff will let the Globe save on the 30% cut Apple would want to hawk the thing in its store (and let the Globe keep full control of subscriber data).
