Mirth

I don't currently get a daily newspaper - I rely on NPR and Wikinews to keep me informed - and I miss being able to read the comics. Reading them online just isn't the same. Most comics pages (like comics.com, gocomics, and arcamax), are not very user friendly, because...

• you have to select your favorite comics from a long drop-down list,
• the comic itself is crowded out by images, text, and advertisements,
• the pages take a long time to load (mostly due to said extra junk), and
• a lot of pages try to load the comic using Flash, which slows things down even more.

Mirth is a solution to all of the above. It displays only the comics themselves, plus basic information on the comic (name, author, and date). The <tab> key takes you to the next comic for the day. While you are reading each comic, the next comic is loaded in the background, so the image is ready the moment you are ready to view it. And you can also use the arrow keys to move between comics or to move forward or backward in time:

• <tab> - Switch to the next day of the next comic (equivalent to <down> followed by <right>)
• <left>, <right> - Switch to the next or previous day of the current comic.
• <up>, <down> - Switch to the next or previous comic, in alphabetical order.
• <space> - Scroll the current comic. Useful for comics too tall to fit in the window.
• ` (backtick, same key as ~) - toggle the preferences page. In the preferences page, use the arrows to select a line and <space> to enable or disable comics.
• <esc>, Ctrl-Q (Cmd-Q on the Mac) - Quit Mirth.

The current version (0.9) displays roughly the same set of comics that you would find in the Boston Globe, the newspaper that I grew up reading. Version 1.0 will let you choose which comics you want to see out of a much larger list. The comics included in version 0.9 are:

• Adam@Home by Brian Basset
• Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson
• Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
• Curtis by Ray Billingsley
• Dilbert by Scott Adams
• Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau
• Family Circus by Bill Keane
• For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston
• FoxTrot by Bill Amend
• Garfield by Jim Davis
• Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley
• Mallard Fillmore by Bruce Tinsley
• Mother Goose & Grimm by Mike Peters
• Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller
• Opus by Berkeley Breathed
• Rose is Rose by Pat Brady & Dom Winner
• Rhymes With Orange by Hilary Price
• Stone Soup by Jan Eliot
• Zits by Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman

Mirth is open source, so if your favorite comic is not included and you do not want to wait for the next version, you can add whatever comics you want.