News is in Palm of Your Hand
  
by Alyson Dame

Technology is changing rapidly, and the Review will not be left behind. Sophomore Kasia Wawer spent her Winter Term redesigning the Review’s website. One exciting new feature is the ability to download current issues onto your PDA, or personal digital assistant, the most well-known of which is the Palm Pilot.
PDAs, as defined by Wawer, are any devices that use either Palm or WindowsCE operating systems. “People are using them increasingly to read their favorite webpages from their Palms,” Wawer said. The New York Times and satirical publication the Onion are examples of webpages where this is already possible. 
Senior Leo Park says he will become a more devoted Review reader now that he can download it onto his Palm. “I really hate carrying around a paper, it’s annoying. But I take my Palm everywhere. Mostly, it’s important because I need something to read in the bathroom,” Parks said, adding, “I think most people of the Palm persuasion would agree.”
Users must have AvantGo software, which is free to download. “The software already existed to do what I wanted to do. I just resized the Review to fit into your PDA,” Wawer said. Her biggest challenge was images. “I got them down to an average of 4k. It was originally something like 2000k,” she said. 
When a user returns to download a new issue, the old issue is replaced by the current information. “If you kept putting a new one on every week you’d run out of space really fast,” Wawer said. 
Wawer, a music composition major, does not plan to pursue computer science. “I really love computers, I’m just not good enough at it to choose it for my career,” said Wawer, who chose this Winter Term project because, “it’s just a fun, geeky, new thing.”