RSS Reader cum Screen Saver

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET Staff on February 27, 2009

This screensaver is designed to serve as an RSS feed reader, but we ran into problems during our tests.

Entering an RSS feed for the app to use was a simple matter. One drawback was that we were able to choose only one feed. Selecting a list of feeds through which the screensaver rotated would have been preferable. The Test screen offered some tasteful default photos, but there seemed to be no way of choosing those for the actual running screensaver. Instead, in the Configure dialog box, we were prompted to select a folder to use for background photos. However, the Browse button automatically selected Windows default Pictures folder, and offered no method for navigating to any other folder.

The default font for headlines was small. Although it wasn't too difficult to read against the background photos, it would have been nice if other fonts and sizes were offered. Further, although the publisher says you can use the screensaver as a feed reader, there was no way of activating a displayed headline to open a browser window or otherwise read the associated story. Attempts to click or press Enter while a headline was highlighted only turned off the screensaver.

The bugs we encountered may result from running under Vista. Otherwise, there are other, similar screensavers available that may work better or offer more flexibility.