Desktop Ticker

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on June 27, 2011

Desktop Ticker is a free scrolling RSS feed display that you can place anywhere on the desktop for an unobtrusive yet instantly accessible and highly customizable news crawl. It's easy to use yet offers lots of options. It can follow news, stocks, and pretty much any other feed you can subscribe to.

Desktop Ticker's small dock-style interface resembles a ticker tape, only with small directional arrows at either end for quickly scrolling forward and back and, on the right, an icon to minimize the display and close the program. A left-side menu has three entries: File, for managing and reloading feeds as well as deselecting the default option to have Desktop Ticker store our settings as a User Profile, should we wish to do so; Tools, for setting the dock's position, speed, and opacity as well as accessing the Options; and Help, which accesses a Web-based User's Guide. The Options dialog let us configure updates, color and sound schemes, and other items such as always-on-top. Desktop Ticker handles most feeds, including a variety of popular feeds supplied as samples, such as BBC News. Under the compact Feed Manager, we could select our feeds, move them up or down in the list order, delete them, and add new ones by pasting in URLs. We could also edit stock symbols for stock feeds. The display's default desktop position is Float, which let us place it anywhere, but we could also fix it to the top or bottom of the desktop. The Opacity control offered a series of levels, while the Speed control worked via simple Faster and Slower commands. The program remembered our changes automatically under our User Profile.

While Desktop Ticker isn't the only scrolling RSS freeware, it's one of the best we've seen. We like its options, especially the ability to change the color schemes to keep things from getting dull. After all, you're going to be looking at it all day, more or less!

 

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Publisher's Description

From Mike Batt:

Desktop Ticker is a free RSS and Atom web feed aggregator application that allows you to keep an eye on the latest news from your favourite websites whilst you work on your computer. Once feeds have been added, the article titles scroll horizontally across the screen. Article summaries are displayed when the mouse cursor is placed over an article title, and the full article can be opened in a web browser by clicking on the article title. The RSS feeds are automatically downloaded after the specified interval to show updated content.

Options include specifying whether all articles are displayed from the RSS feed or just articles created within a set time period, colour coding articles based on their age, and adjusting the scroll speed.

Desktop Ticker can synchronize with the Windows Common Feed List, allowing the list of subscribed RSS feeds to be shared with other applications such as Internet Explorer, Windows Live Mail and Outlook.

Compatible with RSS feeds provided by news sites such as BBC News and CNN, and many other sites including Gmail, Facebook and Flickr. In addition to RSS feeds, Desktop Ticker can also display selected stock information from Yahoo! Finance.

Desktop Ticker is in the Newsreaders & RSS Readers category of the Browsers section.

What's new in this version:

• Fixed issue with high DPI displays.
• Added option to show ticker text in lowercase or uppercase.
• Added feed list import and export functions.
• Added feed performance form showing load time for each feed.

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