News Desktop Scrolling Bar (rss--xml)

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET Staff on February 27, 2009

There's so much to love about this news-ticker-style feed reader that we hope the glitch we encountered is just a trial limitation. News Desktop Scrolling Bar adds a slender bar at the top or bottom of your screen. It only shows the headlines, but it's one click to open the source page and read the full story. It's perfect for keeping you up to date on the latest top stories.

News Desktop Scrolling Bar's configuration panel is sleek and stylish, with easy-to-follow onscreen directions for using it. You can change nearly every aspect of the ticker's appearance, from the background and font colors to the size of the display. Changes to the speed of the scroll and refresh intervals are applied immediately and without a hitch. The program is only preloaded with Yahoo news options, and displays only Top Stories by default, but you can quickly and flawlessly add other Yahoo channels from a list displayed in the program.

And now for the bad news. The panel also has links to a handful of sites' RSS pages, along with a quick button to search Google for feeds, that open new browser windows. The simple onscreen guide directs you to copy a feed shortcut and paste it into a small box on the configuration panel's window. Our testers couldn't get a single feed to paste into the box. The copied shortcuts pasted fine into other applications, so the fault was with News Desktop Scrolling Bar. And that's a shame, because this was a very impressive app, despite a stingy two-day trial restriction.

The publisher didn't list any limitations regarding adding new feeds, and there wasn't much more information on its Web site. With so many free feed readers available, it's a tough sell to recommend one that doesn't allow you to easily add new feeds. Even if you're a big Yahoo News fan, you might want to see headlines from other sources.