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What is TICKR ?
TICKR version 0.7.1 is a Free Open Source, GTK-based RSS READER application which displays RSS FEEDS in a TICKER bar on your desktop. With a single click, you get the latest headlines scrolling in a thin window on your desktop, as what can be seen on Cable News TV channels.
What are RSS Feeds ?
RSS feeds are a web format used to publish frequently updated content (such as news headlines, real-time stock market quotes, blog entries, videos, etc...) in a standardized XML format. Actually, RSS is all about *real-time* information. A RSS document includes text (full or summerized) and metadata such as links to web pages, publishing time, authorship. RSS feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content so you can get the latest headlines and videos in one place, as soon as it's published, *without* having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and virtually includes every "self-refreshing" or "self-updating" web content. When seeing the RSS Logo on a website, clicking on it let you subscribe to its RSS feed, which simply means copying the feed URL and pasting it into your RSS Reader. The basic idea is that you don't have to "refresh" anything because it's done automatically. Once you have bookmarked your favorite feeds, only launch TICKR to know what's going on.
Features
TICKR displays feeds as a smooth scrolling line, as known from TV stations. What makes TICKR different from most other similar applications is that graphics are highly customizable and scrolling is *really* fast and smooth.
Settings include:
- Scrolling speed, update delay, fonts, font sizes and colors, dimensions and location of TICKR on the screen, displaying text inside a "draggable" window or without one, displaying or not a clock, reversing the scrolling direction (convenient for languages written/read from right to left) and much more.
- You can bookmark your favorite RSS feeds, organize and manage them, import/export your feed list and settings, link TICKR with your favourite browser so that you can open links and watch web pages you're interested in with just one click. You can play, pause, reload the current feed, and change the scrolling speed on the fly.
TICKR can also be used with any text files instead of remote XML resources. And it can be used in shell scripts as all parameters can be set from command line.
License
TICKR is a native Linux application written in C with GTK+, Libxml2, GnuTLS and Libfribidi. It has been ported to Windows with MinGW and runs fine on both platforms. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, meaning it is Free Open Source Software - Free as in "free speech" (eventually, it is also free of charge as in "free beer".) You can download the sources and modify / redistribute the app under certain conditions (see the GNU GPL at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.)
Current stable version is 0.7.1.
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