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September 21, 2004

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Tickershock...

Now, this is a nice addition to the RSS/Atom world:

Featuring animated crawl and billboard displays, Tickershock is a departure from typical RSS applications that emulate web browser or email reader environments. Focusing on the “push” nature of the technology, Tickershock aims to be a passive experience only until the user decides a headline is worth exploring: a double-click on a news headline brings up a “News Inspector” from which one can explore a story in greater depth.
Tickershock Tickershock is designed around the “stock ticker” paradigm, where new headlines stream across a “banner” placed somewhere on your screen. Included are several different themes so that you can make the ticker appear in different formats, or you can customize your own (mine is light blue at about 50% opacity, displays a 24pt. font — I’m blind all right?! — and floats at the bottom of my screen).

There are two major disadvantages to Tickershock. The first is that the unregistered version displays a bunch of advertisments in between the actual feeds (indicated with a “[ADV]” tag) — which makes for a good reason to purchase a license. Secondly, double-clicking on a headline doesn’t actually open the website that the headline is attached to but rather a “News Inspector” containing a link to the article — the News Inspector is basically just a browser window, so I don’t know why cicking a headline can’t just open the site.

There are a few minor annoyances as well: I wish Tickershock had a “QuickMenu” option so that it didn’t have to be launched everytime I wanted to use it; the headlines don’t display which feed-source they are from (not even when I hold my mouse over them); clicking the “Browser” button in the News Inspector doesn’t actually open the feed’s website, but only the feed’s text in the browser (and, strangley enough, it opened the text in Safari even though I have my Mac set to open Firefox by default).

On the plus side, Tickershock can import OPML files, you can “grab” the ticker as it scrolls past to move the headlines back and forth (or more slowly or quickly), and it looks pretty darned cool on my desktop.

I’ll try it out for a while and see how it goes. Tickershock has a lot of possibilities, but for now it may just be good for news feeds (and lookin’ cool).

Posted at 3:30 pm

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Comments (1):
Hey Tim, we’ve made some changes to Tickershock (most notably, the ability to open your default browser instead of the News Inspector), and your comments will definitely be considered when finalizing the feature set for Tickershock 1.1. Hope you’ve enjoyed it and thanks for writing about it!

Danny Espinoza () (URL) - October 12, 2004 at 06:00 am

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