Channel 9 - Entries tagged with feeds

Feedling: Put RSS on your Desktop, Beautifully

Sarah Perez — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:52:00 GMT

Cool! The MakeUseof site just discovered a nifty desktop application that lets you put RSS feeds on your desktop. And no, not in some boxed-in widget – actually overlaid on top of your desktop wallpaper as if they were part of your desktop itself!

The open-source project is called Feedling and it and its source can be found over on Sourceforge.

In technical terms, Feedling is an open-source .NET RSS feed reader that pins headlines to your Windows desktop.

Using the program is simple. After downloading and installing the application, you can configure the headlines you want to show by adding feeds under the configuration settings menu. You can even specify how the feeds should appear – that is, what font color, font type, size, hover color and update interval they should use.

The end result is a feed reader (of sorts) that doesn’t pester you with unread item counts – just an attractive, but quietly updating feed of items you’ll like…when you have time to read them.

You can download Feedling from here.

(via, image credit: MakeUseof)

Add Nasa TV to Media Center

Sarah Perez — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:57:00 GMT

Beullpilot on The Green Button forums has offered a tip on getting NASA’s streaming TV feeds into your Windows Media Center. He directs us to the website http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ where you can access the Windows Media download by right-clicking where it says “Windows Media” and choosing “Save Target As.” However, the Hack7mc site made it even easier by providing a downloadable zip file in their SkyDrive that contains all the files you need. After adding the contents provided to the Videos section of your Media Center, you should be able to then see the four NASA feeds available.

Since this trick is accomplished by downloading ASX files from sites that stream Windows Media files, it could be done elsewhere on the web, too, anywhere ASX downloads are available. Know any others? Comment here or on the original post.

Read RSS Feeds on Your Media Center TV

Sarah Perez — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:40:00 GMT

The Media Center RSS Reader application lets you read RSS news items on your Media Center TV as well as watch and/or listen to podcasts and watch video blogs. Originally developed for XP Media Center, there is now also a version for Vista Ultimate. The application adds a new option to Media Center's Start page called "Accessories." From there, you'll have access to a section called "RSS News & Casts" where you'll be able to view your feeds. If you run into any formatting issues or unsupported codecs, the site suggests you try downloading the content to your PC instead via IE's built-in RSS reader, instead. Since I use my Xbox 360 to watch Media Center content on my living room TV, I'm excited to have a way to access not just feeds, but podcasts too, without the addition of another set-top box to do so. (thanks to scribkin for the tip!)

RSS Screensaver

Sarah Perez — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:25:00 GMT

Rsssaver is a RSS screen saver for Windows PCs. Currently in open beta, rsssaver previews RSS feeds from the net and displays them on your screen when your computer's screen saver kicks in. The screen saver shows the channel, title, description, and publish date from any valid RSS URL. Using the OpenGL text rendering engine, the fonts are smooth scrolling and clean. The free application supports Windows 2000, XP, and, as of August, it was "sort of" working in Vista. It looks like the developer hit a snag when trying to code for Vista. Maybe someone can help him out? This would be a killer download for Vista users like myself. The download is available here.

Feeds Plus: Enhanced Feed Reading in IE7

Sarah Perez — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:11:00 GMT

Feeds Plus is an "unofficial" IE7 add-on developed by Nate Furtwangler and Chrix Finne, both of whom interned with the IE RSS Team. The Feeds Plus add-on they created during this time brings aggregation and notification to your IE7 feed reading experience. With Feeds Plus, feeds can be grouped within a folder and read as an aggregated feed, and this feed can be searched, sorted, and filtered just like you can with non-aggregated feeds.

A second feature is a pop-up feed notification reminiscent of Outlook’s. You can decide which feeds matter most to you and then be notified with this pop-up as soon as those feeds have new items waiting. The pop-up is unobtrusive - it fades in and out - and it includes a handy link to the feeds that it’s announcing. For more info on Feed Plus check out this blog post at the Microsoft RSS blog. You can get the Feed Plus add-on here.

Use Windows Live Mail as an RSS Reader

Sarah Perez — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 08:38:00 GMT

It may come as a surprise to you, but there is a free, built-in RSS reader in Windows Vista. Haven't noticed it yet? It's the feed reader that's available in Vista's Windows Live Mail. Windows Live Mail utilizes the Internet Explorer 7 RSS feed store in Windows Vista. The Windows RSS platform takes this "Common Feed List" and intergrates it into Windows Live Mail. This means that any feed you subscribe to in IE7 automatically appears in your Windows Live Mail, too. The feeds are displayed in a separate tab in Windows Live Mail, which makes it easy to switch between your feeds and your email. Since your feeds are in Live Mail, you can take advantage of the "Search Folders" technology to make custom folders for your feeds like "Flagged Feeds," "Unread Feeds," etc. Non-Vista users can get Windows Live Mail here. Thanks to the Windows Vista Blog for this tip!

Upgrade Vista or IE7's Built-In Feed Reader

Sarah Perez — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:13:00 GMT

If you regularly use Vista or Internet Explorer 7's built-in RSS feed reader, but wish you could do more with it, you'll love the free upgrade to RikReader. Codename:RikReader is an RSS reader which complements the RSS platform in Vista and IE7. Once installed, the application offers a choice of views for reading your feeds. You can read feeds in a standard view, with items ordered by date posted. You can read feeds individually, or if they are grouped into folders for better organization, you can read all the items contained in one of the folders.

With the reader's unified view, you can also choose to see all the feeds you subscribe to in a single list. A view called "Newspaper View," displays feeds organized as if they were articles on a newspaper page, which is a unique and aesthetically pleasing way to read your items. Best of all, though, is RikReader's search ability. The reader offers full-text, indexed searching which allows your to perform advanced searching of all of your items quickly and easily from the search box at the top of the reader's window. Search is a feature that is often sorely lacking in many online readers, so that feature alone, makes RikReader worth a try.