Get news on your screensaver!

Screensavers can be so… uninformative sometimes! If you’re tired of kittens, 3D messages or those interminable starscapes, MappedUp could be for you.

In place of your screensaver MappedUp gives you a clean, modern world map made of dots which pulse and pops up stories from RSS feeds around the globe, so you can keep up with world events while not using your computer!

To set MappedUp up properly you need to sign up on their website, although it’s not necessary. Doing so means you can personalize the RSS feeds that will appear on the screensaver. It seems you can’t add anything at all, unfortunately, but there’s a good range of news feeds already available for you to choose.

The screensaver is attractive and well animated, includes the time and date as well as the pop up news balloons. Some of the pop ups do repeat themselves, but anyway the effect is quite cool. Overall the personalizations don’t seem to have a great effect on the pop ups, but this is only a screensaver, not a news feed.

MappedUp is a nice idea, and a really attractive screensaver that makes a nice change to the mundane offerings in windows.