Desktop Ticker

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!