GoBox 2.0 Review Wean Yourself from Your Web Browser? Eric Grevstad
Mon 12/16/02 -- When we first read its maker's claim that GoBox "provides instant access to over 90 percent of the average user's Internet needs," we were almost offended: What about our lovingly ordered bookmarks or favorite sites? Our comic strips? Hadn't the freeware launchpad's developers inexplicably omitted WinPlanet?
But setting aside its sales hype, GoBox is surprisingly capable, in a subversive sort of way: Instead of leaving your Web browser open, taking screen and Taskbar space and system resources, GoBox encourages you to leave only a floating, miniature window [shown actual size here] in a corner of your screen -- it helps if you're working at 1,280 by 1,024 or higher resolution, since the pane can be minimized to just a title bar but is always on top of other applications.
Leave it alone, and GoBox quietly displays an "InfoBar" headline, changing every seven or eight seconds, that alternates among news headlines, local weather and stock quotes, and ad links -- ads account for a healthy half of the items, but at least we never saw two ads in a row. Clicking a headline opens your browser with the weather forecast (from Intellicast.com), stock chart, news story, or e-commerce advertiser.
If you want to open a specific Web site, you can type its address -- just the domain such as winplanet or microsoft, with no need for www. before or .com after -- then choose "Go to URL" from the GoBox menu and click a "Go" button to launch a browser window. Want to do a Web search? Type the search term, select Google or AOL Search, and go; the result window appears. (You can Ctrl-click to select multiple search engines, but only Google, AOL Search, and Yahoo are offered, and the last -- yahoo.google.com -- returns identical results to Google anyway.)
You can type an author or title into GoBox and search Amazon.com, or type just about anything and search eBay. If that's not enough, you can enter a name and search for a home or business phone listing (from WhitePages.com and Lycos Yellow Pages, respectively); type an address or just a city and state to see a map (from Yahoo Maps); or type a title to check movie showtimes in your area (from Fandango.com).
In a final timesaver, you can type either an e-mail address or subject and select "Send e-mail"; GoBox pops up not your whole e-mail client, but just a new-message window with either the "To" or "Subject" line filled in depending on what you typed. You can even type a word and feed it to a simple spell-checker.
Self-Assigned Startup
Setup is easy, if you don't mind GoBox putting itself both onto your desktop and into your Startup group without asking permission: A small (32K) download stub launches, downloads, and installs the main (2.7MB) file; you must supply your name and e-mail address, but won't be bothered with spam and adware (other than the InfoBar ads, that is).
A preferences screen lets you specify your zip code (for weather and movie theater searches), up to five stocks to track, and which of GoBox's functions or search engines to set as a default -- whether, if you type a word and just hit Enter instead of clicking, GoBox will try to open it as a URL, feed it to Google, or whatever.
Did GoBox really replace 90 percent of our Web use? Well, if it had a pull-down or pop-up menu of our browser favorites, it just might have. We'd naturally like a higher ratio of headlines to ad links, as well as a greater variety of news items -- this morning's stories, for instance, came from a variety of sources (CNN.com, the New York Times, the Washington Post, BBC News, and the International Herald-Tribune), but rotated swiftly through only seven items.
But its news, weather, and stock updates with quick access to searches, phone numbers, and maps (as well as fix for eBay addicts) makes GoBox a worthy addition to the ranks of browser add-ons and alternatives ranging from WeatherBug to the Google Toolbar.
