Updated 5/5/06 Well, it didn't take more than one quick spin with this great piece of freeware to convince me! Now, if only I had time to actually read the comics these days... But one great thing about iStrip is that you can cache the comics locally and read them later, or... you can bookmark them just like you would any other kind of book. Returning later, just pop open a strip at your bookmark!

Other nice touches are the software's ability to magnify and shrink the strip art, to adjust for different viewing needs. You can go back a month to see strips starting about a month ago. Hidden in the preferences is the ability to pre-fetch up to 300 of the previous images for a given strip! Of course, first you will want to "Manage Strips."

To manage strips is to select which among the 316 available strips you actually want to "enable" in the pull-down menus, pre-fetch function, navigation controls, etc. iStrip comes with all 316 enabled! I can just imagine how long it would take me to look at all 316 and see which ones I really wanted to follow. If you're already a comic strip fiend, and don't know about iStrip yet... you're in for a real treat. iStrip also has the ability to email a given strip to a friend... just select the strip and use the menu function "Strip/Send email".

If you have the disk space, I suppose it makes sense to first select the strips you want, and then prefetch up to 300 previous ones... that's going to be more than a year, folks! Then you'll be able to use the date menu to navigate back to the earlier stories.

Like I said, if only I had more time...!