Snackr: Stylish RSS ticker on your desktop

These days, the internet is one of the popular sources for information and news that people use. The problem is that many people have trouble keeping tabs on their favorite sites. The typical solution to this problem is the use of RSS feeds, but finding the right program that suits your needs may be hard. Well, lucky for you I have a very good one called Snackr, an RSS ticker (scrollboard) that runs in your computer’s desktop. See my Snackr review after the break…

How it works?

Snackr is an application that runs on Adobe Air, a cross-platform run time environment for building and running rich internet applications (Flash, HTML) right on the computer without the need for a browser. Setting up is easy, and really only involves you downloading Adobe Air (download here), and installing through Adobe Air’s installer. Once that’s done, it typically opens automatically. You will notice that Snackr does open under all your windows (on the desktop). Just to show you what it looks like, I posted a picture of it to the below this paragraph.

Pros

What’s great about Snackr is that you can add as many RSS feeds as you want to it, and then each “headline” will be shown on the ticker. If you want to read one of the posts that are in the feed, you can choose to read the whole article (with pictures) in the reader, or on the article’s actual site (option via the post-viewer). In addition to these features, there are many other options, including:

• changing the ticker speed
• changing the ticker opacity
• update rate (seconds between feed updates)
• start at login
• Google Reader syncing

Another plus to this application is its look. Its very minimal and cool design will make it a very great piece for any desktop, and personally, I can say that it can make any desktop look even more “tech-y” and cool. The creators even go as far as letting you choose the location of the ticker. You can choose to put it on the: top, bottom, left, and right.

Cons

Well, this application may seem feature packed for an RSS reader, but it is missing some things. The Snackr app unfortunately lacks the feature of scrolling through your feed, which isn’t good if you have tons of feeds and have to refer back to a post that passed the boundary of the ticker. As for aesthetics, you don’t have a choice of changing any of Snackr’s colors, fonts, styles, or even sizes. It would be cool to see some theming capability, which would help make your Mac’s desktop even more like eye candy.

Conclusion

Overall, this application is great because of what it does: showing your favorite RSS feeds in a commonly visited place on your computer, the Desktop, though scrolling on the ticker is a really needed feature. As for aesthetics, the ticker itself looks great, and adds some “eye candy” appeal to your Desktop, though some theme and color options would help make it look even better.

Snackr is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux for free. [Snackr Site]