I actually reckon that having a news ticker scrolling across the bottom of my computer screen would be incredibly useful way of getting the latest news. Especially if I could customise the types of headlines and add RSS feeds to it like you can with the BigPond ticker. Unfortunately, I can’t because BigPond has made their Ticker Windows-only, meaning Mac users like me miss out, at least for the time being.Apparently they’re “looking into a Mac version” though, at which point I’d probably download it. Sure, all the headlines are going to come from BigPond, but with the ability to add an RSS feed by dragging the RSS icon into the ticker bar, it’s incredibly easy to add your own content – like Gizmodo – and it looks like a fairly unobtrusive way to get the latest headlines.
Also worth noting is that any data is unmetered for BigPond users, although I can’t imagine that scrolling headlines would suck up too much bandwidth…
If any of you PC users out there are game to try it out, let us know what you think in comments.
[BigPond]
Ollie
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 2:15 PMI can’t seem to add the Gizmodo AU feed. Haven’t tried any others yet.
Other than that it looks kind of pretty… something else to distract me at work lol.
Ollie
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 2:20 PMNever mind… shut it down and reopened it and it seems all sweet now, Giz FTW :)
Red T-Rex
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 2:24 PMPersonally, I can’t think of anything more annoying or distracting.
mike
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 2:39 PMGood idea.
Installed but doesn’t seem to run on my system.
Alpha
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 3:17 PM* autoproxy doesn’t work for adding custom RSS
* ticker disappears if u drag it to 2nd monitor. reinstalling restores it.
Jono Rogers
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 3:33 PMjust installed it, seems to work well, apart from that with news and giz’s feeds on it seems to do one after the other instead of breaking the stories up.. also no color scheme editing is a bit lame, doesn’t go with the rest of my desktop.. only other thing is it leaves a 2-3 pixel gap between the ticker and firefox, showing me colours from my desktop, looks strange..
apart from that its cool… i like it..
Hamish
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 6:41 PMBe even better if they could spell ‘mourn’ correctly… Nice one Telstra.
Mark
Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 7:48 AMJust installed – what a ripper, dragged it to the top of my second monitor and works a charm. Seems to pause very so often and would be nice to filter the news, otherwise, definitely something I will stay with.
Paul Walker
Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 3:59 PMNewsTicker http://www.nullriver.com/products/newsticker does the same thing on OS X. However it is really quite distracting & I wouldn’t use it myself.