Check the news in a customizable horizontal scrolling bar

SofTicker is a free RSS reader which displays feeds in a scrolling bar at the top of your screen. It is not an invasive display mode and you can click on the title which is scrolling in that moment to open a tab or a new web page.

There are fourteen default RSS feeds you can manage and of course you can add your own. The good thing about this reader is that it perfectly integrates into your screen and it doesn’t take much space, just a line at the top. The news scrolls very slowly, so it is easy to read, and if you pass the mouse above, you might have a short description according to the web site that originates them. You can even choose the speed of the scrolling and the size of the words, although you can just select between a size 8 and 9. Making the font bold will render the white words more readable as the bar’s background is black.

From a usability point of view, I find for example that showing three news sources at a time and changing them at specific intervals would be more effective than scrolling just one news source which you have to follow in order to read. Moreover, having something that moves all the time on the top of your screen can be really annoying after a while.

SofTicker allows you to be always updated with the last news from your favorite website although the display mode chosen is not the most usable one.

SofTicker is a tiny desktop gadget that helps you check the news from any web site providing RSS feeds.

This is the first release, Vista compliant, that reads rss feeds over http protocol or locally from rss/xml files. The application gives to the user possibility to add/remove rss links and shows them by a customizable horizontal scrolling bar.