Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen. I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use. Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement. It is not for the faint of heart or information averse, either.
If you've ever fantasized about having the river of news flow straight into your brain, this is the closest I've seen yet. I've uploaded a small OPML file of my top priority feeds, limited Snackr to displaying items from within the last 5 days and am in heaven. Read on for screenshots and some critique.
Snackr was built by Narciso Jaramillo, a long time Adobe developer now working on the Flex product line.
Below is a screenshot of the live ticker, paused when an item is clicked. The scrolling is really smooth, story order is randomized. When you click on an item, the full text will appear if it's available in the feed. The link at the bottom of the pop-up will take you to the full post.
You can have Snackr running at the top, bottom, left or right margin of your screen. I clapped my hands and jumped up and down like a little school girl upon seeing each different view for the first time.
The idea is not to read every item here, but to give your eye some opportunity to catch items it might not otherwise. I love it.
So far I've only got two requests for Snackr development. The site supports authenticated feeds (password protected, something Google Reader can't do) which is great. When I click on an item from a particular filter's RSS feed in my GMail account though, the popup window prompts but doesn't allow me to log-in. I wish that were different.
Second, once I uploaded an OPML file, I ended up with some feeds I wanted to unsubscribe from and had to do so one at a time. Bulk feed management would be nice. A javascript bookmarklet to add a feed to Snackr with a click, when I discover it around the web, would be great too. Media handling could be improved as well.
All in all though, I am very excited to discover the app. It was the first app I happened to look at on FreshAIR Apps today, an AIR site we reviewed earlier this week. I plan to spend a lot more time on that site, as AIR is a very exciting platform.
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Looks pretty much like what Particls was doing last year. Might have to try this out.
Posted by: Jeff Brewster | May 16, 2008 12:15 PM
I just installed it and played with it a bit.
1. I could never use this at work -- productivity level would be 0. I have shiny object syndrome.
2. You can't select more than one feed at a time in the feed manager. How are you supposed to delete the default feeds it comes with without spending 15 minutes of click delete, confirm, select the next one...
Fun app, but only really useful if you are a blogger/journalist.
Posted by: Ryan Merket | May 16, 2008 12:17 PM
Jeff, that thought crossed my mind too but I think Particls is more complex, tied to the browser and not AIR.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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May 16, 2008 12:18 PM
Ryan, you don't think you could put work-related feeds in there and use it at work?
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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May 16, 2008 12:20 PM
Oh crap. Another thing to distract me. It's RSS on crack. As if RSS wasn't crack enough on it's own. One more step closer to just injecting information into my brain subconsciously.
Honestly, the multi-tasking environment we live in will probably kill our productivity. I think this kind of information overload is like alcohol. It's great, but you really have to temper using it when you want to get something accomplished. And dear lord, don't use it while driving. ;)
Posted by: nate ritter | May 16, 2008 12:29 PM
Sounds cool, but didn't we do tickers back in 1998 and we all ditched them then too? (I used to run Yahoo! ticker all the time at the top of my screen and then realized that it was really just annoying.)
What next? An AIR version of PointCast? (PointCastr?) $10 says we have it before 2009.
Posted by: Dave | May 16, 2008 12:35 PM
I just realized that some of you young'ins might not remember Web 0.5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointcast
Posted by: Dave | May 16, 2008 12:36 PM
I'm a web designer, so the only thing that would be relevant for work would be AListApart-type blogs - which, when reading, generally don't add to my productivity of the task at hand.
At work I should be chiseling down on my to-do list, not staring a ticker on the side of my screen showing me the latest design or news blogs.
Posted by: Ryan Merket | May 16, 2008 12:44 PM
Snackr is awesomesauce! Thanks for the find Marshall!
@Nate Ritter - You're hilarious lol Just don't use it too much. As Marshall stated, skim these items and you shouldn't be too overwhelmed in the end
@Dave - This ticker rules! If more tickers were made like this I wouldn't mind them coming back in style ;)
@Ryan - This isn't for work. It's for leisure. We wouldn't want our readers getting fired over this!
Posted by: Corvida | May 16, 2008 12:58 PM
RSS tickers have been around *forever* (esp. on the Mac) and now it's news because it uses AIR? Has "written in AIR" has become the new "on the web" for describing an old technology in a new medium?
Posted by: Libster | May 16, 2008 1:17 PM
Libster, yes, that may be the case! lol AIR apps are almost without fail super easy on the eyes because of Flash/Flex integration.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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May 16, 2008 1:20 PM
#6 @Dave that was my first thought when I saw this post. I also remember the uproar that PointCast caused when it came out with people questioning the security of having a third party given access to our desktops like that....
look how far we've come :)
Posted by: Steven Hodson | May 16, 2008 1:29 PM
@Marshall--thanks so much for the kind words! A bunch of people noticed that multiselect doesn't work in the feed list--I fixed that locally and should be pushing out a build through the autoupdate mechanism in the next couple days (once I fix a couple other embarrassing bugs).
I actually didn't know Snackr worked with password-protected feeds! I didn't put anything in to make that work, so I'm a little surprised. I'll have to try a Gmail feed myself and see if I can reproduce your issue.
@Libster et al.--yeah, RSS tickers are definitely not a new idea :) Mostly I just wrote it because I've never gotten into the habit of using a real RSS reader (too much stuff to read), and I wanted to try building an AIR app. It turned out to be really easy to write in Flex, and using AIR meant it worked on Windows, Mac, and Linux pretty much out of the box with no extra work. I used to do Win/Mac cross-platform desktop app development in C++, and it was so not a picnic...
Posted by: nj | May 16, 2008 2:02 PM
Sounds good, but another rss client http://www.mindity.com/WhatIs.aspx does the same job with running ticker (beta) and has all other "standard" rss reader features..
Posted by: Kostik | May 16, 2008 3:24 PM
Kostik, Mindity is Windows only. This little baby is cross-platform on AIR
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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May 16, 2008 5:19 PM
Thanks for the review. I´m a fan of Adobe products but I still haven´t tried this one.
Posted by: jc | May 16, 2008 8:23 PM
GREAT stuff. One of the best AIR apps I've seen yet
Posted by: Charlie Anzman | May 16, 2008 10:17 PM
@Marshall: "This little baby is cross-platform on AIR"
That's true, but I have had very little luck installing Adobe Air on Ubuntu 7.10.... so much for true cross-platform...
Posted by: Thijs (Shenzhen) | May 16, 2008 11:03 PM
Looks very promising. On a sidenote, you can actually have password-protected feeds in Google Reader:
http://critic.typepad.com/planetsab/2007/10/password-protec.html
Posted by: Sebastian | May 16, 2008 11:45 PM
I so agree. I found it via here I think. Putting a few of my favourite Google searches paid off right away with great finds.
I've now started adding more feeds for breaking news and info.
The trick is, of course, to not pour too many feeds in, then if just becomes another source of info overload.
Posted by: Tris Hussey | May 17, 2008 3:11 AM
Snackr has been running all night on Ubuntu Linux without problem. Still works like a charm.
http://tinyurl.com/4z8jwn
Posted by: Robert | May 17, 2008 7:26 AM
Bulk feed management would be nice. A javascript bookmarklet to add a feed to Snackr with a click, when I discover it around the web, would be great too. Media handling could be improved as well.
Posted by: prefabrik yapı | May 17, 2008 8:23 AM
Talk about your river of news.
Posted by: rexhammock.myopenid.com
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May 17, 2008 1:00 PM
is it only me ? - or is it a worry when someone from a company admits to NOT knowing somtehing as obvious as wether their products works with secure RSS or not - when that is the main thing that their product does.
the 3 concerns are
a) - they didnt know
b) - they then publically admitted it and said let me go play with this.
c) - this is to do with security and they go 'oh didnt know that'
Posted by: steve | May 17, 2008 8:34 PM
I installed snackr a little while ago, and think it's phenomenal. I only wish there were a way to pause/rewind/ffwd the feeds.
Posted by: Erik | May 19, 2008 1:26 PM
bah, it is okay but it needs alot of work, i still like alertbear for my feeds - small, runs in the background, and only pops up if there is a new item in the feeds.
Posted by: taddict | May 21, 2008 9:40 AM