My Favorite RSS Feed Ticker – Snackr!

by James • June 1, 2012 • Downloads

By posting this screenshot, which is not mine, I am in no way endorsing CNN as a legitimate news outlet.

I don’t know why I never wrote anything about Snackr before, because I use it on a daily basis, when operating in Windows 7 on my blog-laptop.

Yes, I said blog-laptop; that’s a thing now, or at least I’m making it a thing… yeah.. Moving right along!

My morning routine involves firing up my laptop, and checking the news. I got tired of visiting the same sites over and over and decided to check out the technology, which, until now, had been symbolic of the late 90′s.

RSS Feeds. Yes, the little ugly orange button that you may have seen on sites before in weird places. RSS stands for REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION, and in a nutshell, it takes your posts to a site, or a certain area of a site, and aggregates them into a long list with minimal content other than a bit of text, and maybe a thumbnail.

Snackr does a great job of combining ease of use, with an intuitive interface with many customization options. You can change the position of the feed to be on the sides of the screen, or the top/bottom, depending on your preference.

The bottom feed was a bit crowded at first, which is how I found out how to make it scroll on the side of my screen.

You can change options like opacity, and the speed at which it ticks past you. I like to keep mine on the slow speed, with it on the side of the screen near my Windows Taskbar which is also on the side of the screen. My desktop resolution is 1366×768 so it fits with a decent bit of room to write articles.

Here is a screenshot of what I am trying to describe:

Snackr is on the left, with the opacity at 80% and feeds set to Random Newest

As you can see, it is out of the way, and convenient to access. One of the best features, is that there is no ‘rush’ element to Snackr. If you want to pause the feed, you can just mouse over it. If you want to slow it down, you can do that too, but sometimes I am typing an article and see something interesting that I want to read later without forgetting about it, I just mouse over it, or ‘star’ the post with the little star icon.

You can also click on an article, and it opens up in a little convenient, stripped-down browser that has no ads or anything, just the meat and potatoes.