Snackr: An RSS News Ticker

I used an RSS bot for years, integrated with AIM and Gtalk, called Feedcrier. Alas, I could never get it to do exactly what I wanted, but it was close.

In a nutshell, I wanted to load in a gazillion RSS feeds, and have new posts pop up whenever they were published. I have always hated the RSS reader model of consuming posts like so many Pez candies. However, I have started to gravitate toward the social reader model of Google Reader/Feedly, and Friendfeed. But those still feel like an RSS reader: a little box I stick my head into with a long list of posts waiting to be manipulated. I have to click things to get them to open and to get them to go away. Basically, I like the idea of RSS feeds but not “RSS readering”.

I want the flow model — which I kind of had with Feedcrier — which among other things doesn’t involve me doing much, except for moving my eyes, and occasionally clicking on something of interest.

Today, I stumbled upon Snackr, an adobe air client app that presents a ticker metaphor for RSS.

Snackr, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I don’t have to do anything: posts just trikle by all day. I set the speed to slow, and periodically see something of interest, and click on it: a window pops up above the item, and I can read the piece in place (so long as the publisher supports full posting in their RSS). I can also click through to get the story to pop in my browser.

Even better, the newest version of Snackr supports direct integration of Google Reader feeds, so I didn’t even have to import anything to get it working. And it’s very very pretty.

I will post more about Snackr after I have been using it for a while.