NewsTicker is a utility for displaying the headlines from www.apple.com, www.news.com (technical news service provided by c|net), and www.cnn.com. It puts up a floating windowoid where the headlines scroll by. Double-clicking on a headline will open your browser to show the full story.
It also can track up to ten pages, showing when they have changed.
This is a hack, and is provided as is and no guarantee is provided. Until you've used it a while and are sure it's stable on your machine, save often. You use it at your own risk. Abandon all hope ye who read past here.
What does it require?
Open Transport (MacTCP won't work)
Either a full-time connection to the Internet or configured to dial up automatically.
Internet Config
TSM Helper won't hurt
The SubWoofer version also requires SubWoofer (Internet Access) in the same folder as NewsTicker or in the Extensions folder.
How does it work?
Magic.
OK, not magic. NewsTicker reads in the web pages, parses out the headlines, and shows them. It reloads CNN and News.Com every 20 minutes. It checks Apple's page every hour to see if it has been changed.
It also checks one web page every ten minutes to see if it has been changed and, if so, puts it back in the scrolling list. Accessing the web-page by double-clicking on the web page to look at it makes that web-page be removed from the scrolling list.
Oh, and that SubWoofer is doing the downloading on the PPC version, it handles Internet transfers easily, check out devworld.apple.com for more info!
So this skips all the advertisements, right?
It skips the advertisement on the main page, but the individual stories have their advertisements shown. NewsTicker is an attempt at making the news more accessible so you can look at the stories more often (and see those ads more often), it's not an attempt to avoid ads. The programmer thinks ad-funded pages are good. Better than us paying for them.
What's this demo mode?
It only shows the first three headlines from each page. That way you can wait through all pages quickly, making a cool demo. Uncheck that checkbox to see all the headlines on the pages.
Help, it seems locked up, the beach ball keeps spinning. What do I do?
Hit command-period to cancel a lookup. Maybe your internet link is down.
The blue beachball is a little weird.
Thanks, it was meant to be.
Who are you?
Donald Brown, don.brown@cesoft.com. This is a hack only, it's not a continuing product and so no bug fixes or improvements are planned. It has nothing at all to do with my employer of CE Software (but do stop by and see www.cesoft.com--if you like NewsTicker, you'll love MailTicker, part of QuickMail Pro 1.5) But, if you have feedback, I'd be happy to hear from you.
Anything else?
Just the fine print.
CNN is a trademark of Cable News Network, Inc. c|net and news.com are trademarks of CNET, Inc. Apple and the fruit logo are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Donald Brown is a trademark of Mr. and Mrs. Austin R. Brown, Jr. The mention of the companies listed above should not be taken as any sort of endorsement of the companies involed, this product was not created in cahoots with any of them and they're hearing about this the same time you are.
