A desktop news ticker that keeps its own lane
A desktop news ticker answers one question all day long: has anything happened? Instead of a homepage that pulls you in for twenty minutes, you get a single moving line of headlines at the edge of the screen, and you only click the one that matters.
The usual complaint about scrolling tickers on Windows is that they float on top of everything and sit across the very toolbar you need. This one can register its strip with Windows itself. Switch on Keep windows off the bar and maximized apps stop short of the ticker exactly as they stop short of the taskbar, so nothing hides underneath it and it never hides anything.
Headlines from different feeds are woven together rather than played in blocks, and each one is tagged with the feed it came from. A bar fed by five outlets reads as five outlets, not as ten minutes of one site followed by ten of another.
How to add an RSS feed to the ticker
Open settings and go to News sources. Three feeds come preloaded, covering world news, technology and sports, so the bar has something to show from the first minute.
- Click Browse feeds to pick from well-known news feeds with one click.
- Or add your own: give it a Name, paste the Feed address, and it joins the rotation. RSS, Atom and RDF addresses all work.
- Turn off Include in the ticker to rest a feed without losing it.
- Set Headlines from each feed between 5 and 40, and Check for new headlines every 5 to 120 minutes.
An RSS widget you can read on the move
A crawl is only useful if you can catch the line you care about. Rest the pointer on the bar and the scroll stops so you can finish reading. Turn the mouse wheel to bring back a headline that has already slid past. Click it and the full story opens in your browser.
Show which feed each headline came from labels every item with its source, and Show when each story was published can add the clock time, such as 2:45 PM, or the age, such as 12 min ago. See-through until you point at it lets the strip fade back while you work and come up solid as soon as you reach for it.
Styles and placement on Windows 11
Style has four built-in looks. Broadcast is the familiar TV strip with a colored badge. Breaking adds a band above the crawl where one headline holds still long enough to read. Ribbon is compact, and Quiet nearly disappears into the desktop. The Badge word and Badge color are yours to change, so the label can read LIVE, MARKETS or your team's name, in up to 14 characters. Left blank, it says NEWS.
Runs across the places it at the Top of the screen, Middle of the screen or Bottom of the screen, and with more than one monitor, Shown on picks the display. Scrolling speed runs from 20 to 160 and Text size from 11 to 22. Sits keeps it Above other windows or On the desktop, and Start with Windows has it running before your first coffee.
