We live in an increasingly complex world. Between the floods in Pakistan, violence in the Mideast, or Paris Hilton’s latest arrest, we gain little comfort from the day’s news.
Where do you get your daily dose of warm and fuzzy? For me, it used to be a select number of comics in the newspaper. Newspaper? Remember that quaint method of reading news? The newspapers are digital, comics are digital, and so are my warm and fuzzy moments.
Click To Read OVer 200 Daily Comic Strips
With hundreds of comic strips in the newspapers and online there is no shortage of opportunities for insight and humor. The newspaper brought the comics to a single page or two.
The internet has fragmented daily comics to hundreds of web pages.
Whether it’s Dilbert or Shoe, Doonesbury or Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes or Frank & Ernest. the warm and fuzzy moment you choose is available somewhere on the world wide web.
The problem is fragmentation. Hundreds of online comics also mean hundreds of web pages to click. Even if your comic chuckles and insight are limited to a couple of dozen favorites, you’re still putting time and effort into each warm and fuzzy.
Funny Pages to the rescue. Over 200 comics with a few clicks.
The Little Mac App That Can
Simply put, Funny Pages gives you quick online access to a few hundred comic strips, which includes most of the national favorites. Here are a few of mine.
The Funny Pages app lists all the comics available in the left hand column. Click and the comic strip is downloaded to your Mac.
The calendar lets you view comics from specific dates. Each comic can be saved to your Mac, added to iPhoto, and the app lets you create a favorites playlist so you don’t have to scroll through the entire list of 200 to get half a dozen favorites.
If you’re into the insight and humor provided by comic strips then you’ll recognize the value in Funny Pages. The app costs a few dollars but makes gathering comic strips much easier. There’s also an iPhone version.
All these digital warm and fuzzy comic strips brings up an interesting question.
Is downloading digital comics legal?
Each comic strip is copyrighted by the author or some distribution syndicate, yet a number of such comic aggregation utilities exist for Macs and PCs.
Newspaper circulation has dropped dramatically in recent years, so I wonder about the business model for comic strips. Do the strips get advertising money from their web sites? Why do they allow such apps to grab their strips and make them available so easily?
Whatever the legalities, apps such as Funny Pages do a service for readers—low cost aggregation of the most popular comic strips.
