Featured Freeware: Titlebar Ticker

If you don't want to spend a lot of time checking your RSS newsreader for updated feeds, you can do it on the fly with this application, which places a headline ticker at the top of the currently active window in addition to offering the standard reader.

Titlebar Ticker places a relatively unobtrusive bar at the top of your active windows frame that clearly indicates when fresh content arrives. A neat mouseover feature opens a second tier with the news source name, navigation arrows to move to another news feed, and an icon for opening a drop-down list of all the headlines from the current feed. Titlebar Ticker also adds an RSS icon in the system tray. Right-clicking the RSS icon let us customize a number of options, including having the application play a tone when a feed updates. Left-clicking the RSS icon opened a three-paned window, similar to the familiar e-mail client interface for listing the feed sources, headlines, and Web links.

There seems to be a bit of bug when clicking on a link from the main interface. The link launcher in the ticker works fine, but the one from the program's three-paned UI doesn't respect your default browser and instead forces Internet Explorer to open. That problem aside, Titlebar Ticker is recommended for its handy dual approach to reading feeds.