Okay I'm in a shareware leeching junkie mode. For awhile now I have used the Yahoo! News ticker which is a little scrolling news ticker for Windows. It has a very configurable set of news categories and a pretty easy to use and configure interface. Well anyway they're no longer providing it for download, and saying it's no longer supported. So while it still works for me, it could stop working at any minute.

So does anyone have any suggestions on good news tickers? Preferably small with lots of options to configure the news items you get. I already have (and use) Headline Viewer which is a much more featured program, but I like the idea of having main headlines and sports scores scroll by in a small ticker window. Very handy.

If anyone has any suggestions let me know.

I've been looking for a similar product, but have yet to find one. Some of the major news sites have proprietary software to install, but even after configuring, what they deem "news" and what I deem "news" are two VERY different things.

I've been thinking for a while about writing a news utility that would basically scrape the major web sites for news and post it as a ticker in the task bar or window. I could whip this thing together in a few hours. If you have any ideas about features you'd want, post them.

And yes, it'd be freeware ;)

A long time back when Push Technology was going to change the world, I played around with a program called Pointcast. And it looks like something similar is now at it's old domain of http://www.pointcast.com. Might be worth checking out.

I used Pointcast for a long time. Was a pretty good product, if I remember right. But it had the same old problem, too much noise and newsless news.

I've simply gotten in the habit now of checking a few web sites regularly that I find post news items that I deem newsworthy. Of course, I need to go out and load the pages to see the news and I end up checking the sites more often than they change. I'd love to have a ticker that told me when the page changed and what headlines changed.

The utility I'm thinking about would do just that and would allow you to click on a headline to go to the originating page. All very simple, of course, but I haven't seen it done right yet.

I always loved this description of why PointCast sucks.

Well, the best I've done so far is Headline Viewer. It lets you customize *everything* from hundreds of sites, but it lacks the "news ticker" mode that I really want, so it takes up a lot of screen real estate. I still use it, and it's pretty nice... If the selection of what's news and what's not is your concern, try that one out.

The night I posted that message I did some *exhaustive* net searches for such a program, and tried at least 15 of them out. Each of them had their problems. The biggest problem I found was that most of them wanted to either dock to an always-on-top taskbar, or they wouldn't let me drag them to my 2nd monitor. The ones that weren't plagued with these problems were just plagued with not having the right selection of news sources. Some were just plain ugly.

So for now I'm sticking with Headline Viewer, it's got all the content I want, just not the presentation.

Pointcast was one of the first ones I looked at last week. I had downloaded it many moons ago and didn't think it was anything to write home about.. But to my surprise, I found that Pointcast is no more. Something called InfoGate has replaced it. I downloaded InfoGate and it's got a crappy interface that you can't really customize at all beyond changing the location of things. I don't care about a screen saver, all I want is a nice compact news ticker that I can throw on my 2nd monitor.

Yeah, it's amazing to me how many programs ignore the second monitor issue. Most problems occur when the program checks to see if it has been moved off of the dimensions of the main monitor and then replaces itself within the reported dimensions. One more API call would allow the program to "see" the second monitor.

This is the whole reason I moved to Trillian from ICQ. I couldn't get ICQ to sit properly on the second monitor and Trillian will.

I tried out Headline Viewer. Nice little program. Heavy on the includes for us bandwidth-impaired folks, but pairing down the active list fixed that.

The problem is that it uses MoreOver, which is listed as adware/spyware on my system and it's automatically filtered out. I use a couple of pieces of software to keep ads and spyware off my system. I could disable the MoreOver entries, but they're there for a reason.

Oh well, maybe I WILL need to write my own.

Yeah, most people don't run with 2 monitors so I'm sure it's not one of their test cases when they write the software. Headline Viewer sits on my 2nd monitor just fine. But I want a damn ticker. I want to be able to just glance over and when I see a story that I'm interested in, double click it and get the details. Since my VMware Linux virtual machine runs on most of my 2nd monitor, Headline Viewer is just too big for me to pay any attention to. A ticker would be perfect but they all suck.

Oy... Moreover = spyware/adware? That sucks. I would love to find more information about this. I don't know anything about moreover. Any way we can find out what got them into the spyware category?

Basically I've got an LMHOSTS file that resolves hundreds (if not thousands) of known ad-ware sites to 127.0.0.1 (local machine). This prevents me from having to load ads. I got the list when those damn cover-the-browser flash ads started cropping up but I'm very happy to have it now that I've been forcefully throttled back to <56k. Keeps the extra resolutions and downloads to a minimum.

It's probably just listed in there as a primary ad site.