Feed Roller Is A Lightweight Twitter And RSS Feed Ticker
Most users who subscribe to RSS feeds read these feeds in feed readers that can either be accessed from the desktop or on a website. Popular options are for instance the Feed Demon software program or Google Reader on the web. There are some other options for users who do not want to open a website or a feed reader software to view the updates. One option is the Feed Roller program which displays an RSS feed and Twitter ticker on top of the computer monitor screen.
The lightweight software program has been designed with lots of comfortable options to configure news sources and control the ticker on top of the screen. Several hotkeys are provided to pause (pause key) or disable (F11) the ticker. Other useful hotkeys are F8 to open the options, F12 to manage the feeds and Print Screen to visit the website of the current news item.
RSS Feeds can be added manually by pasting a single url into the feed manager. Multiple feeds can be imported from an opml file that most RSS feed readers can import and export feeds to. Only the user's Twitter account can be added to the program as it is required to enter a username and password to display the Twitter messages. A lot of options are provided by the software that change the appearance of the feeds in the ticker. This ranges from transparency effects to fonts and the speed of the animation.
Feed Roller proves to be an interesting alternative for users who want to view news feeds without having to access another program to do so. The application uses less than 10 Megabytes of computer memory, is supplied as a portable version or installer and is compatible with most Microsoft operating systems.
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Regarding security issues, who, what to believe ?
VirusTotal.com reflects 4 negative scans regarding FeedRoller_Setup.exe (FeedRoller 0.55 downloaded from http://sector-seven.net/software/feedroller) and the result page is here : http://preview.tinyurl.com/yyvnfcs
I ask because false positive exist, so, again, who to rely on ?
Update:
Version 0.43 is now live.
With improved OPML and Twitter handling (already done in 0.42, which was released an hour an a half before 0.43…)
With Snap to Bottom
With fixed Snap to Top (if taskbar is on top, we will not hide it)
See Options->Interface for Snap to Bottom
Hey,
Thanks for all the feedback and feature requests :)
@dr. xadium
1. ability to pin to bottom – on the todo list. The only thing that complicates it is multiple monitors
2. I dont understand what do you mean here
3. Right now the ticker hides when your mouse is near it to allow you to click things underneath.
4. Earlier versions of the ticker (unreleased) did that and also fade in/out – but caused too many issues – maybe I will bring it back.
LOL because I’m horrible I’ll actually make a series of feature requests XD
1- Ability to pin to the bottom of the screen as opposed to the top (I keep my taskbar up top)
2- Ability to pin it to the desktop and leave it open all the time (so I can look down and read feeds)
3- Ability to click on the headline when it’s in that mode and have it go to the article in question rather than using a hotkey since other apps might use that hotkey.
4- Merely for eye Candy’s sake, probably too computationally expensive, but ehh– CNN style newsticker scrolling from right to left. (Not really that interested in it but it might be a fun experiment)
I LOVE this app! I was thinking about hacking Rainmeter to do something similar this morning.
Thanks for this post.
As always, feature requests and feedback is welcome.