550 of the world’s newspapers in a widget

iActu brings the latest news from more than 550 newspapers and magazines onto your Dashboard. It’s free although you are bugged with a few small ads in the corner.

iActu differs to a simple ticker because it shows the front page of the paper on a newsstand like display. The first thing you’ll need however, is to set up iActu because by default it’s set up for American readers. This isn’t as clear as it should be. You’d think there would be an option to setup by country or via the “i” button but there isn’t. What I finally discovered is that I had to delete the default entries one by one and then search for the newspapers I wanted to add.

However, some front covers don’t show up for some reason such as The Times in the UK. The another really annoying thing is that the front covers are barely visible and there’s no way to expand the widget. What iActu does provide however is links to each of the major stories in the papers, a brief excerpt and it even allows you to browse the paper by category.

Overall, iActu could have been a much better widget, not least by enabling you to configure it by country and expand the size of it. However, for free, it’s not bad at all.