Snackr – Fancy Feed Reader (Adobe Air App)

RSS feeds have become the de facto standard for delivering massive amounts of content in a very simple to read and simple to understand format. Any website delivering daily, weekly or even monthly updates, and lacking a ‘Really Simple Syndication’(RSS) feed, just isn’t delivering what is becoming the most popular form of delivery.

Along with the RSS feed, have come several hundred readers, many promising different features and options, and many with several pros and cons. There is no doubt that Google Reader has become far and away the most popular of all of these readers, not only for its integration to your Google Account, but for its ease of use and excellent features as well. However, when it becomes overwhelmed with hundreds and thousands of articles, it becomes extremely cluttered and almost impossible to go through. That’s where Adobe Air’s Snackr RSS ticker solves this problem.

Snackr RSS Reader, is an incredibly handy, transparent ticker that continuously scrolls at the bottom, top, left or right part of your screen, delivering random items from all of your various RSS feeds. I’ve only been using it for a short time, and I am quickly finding out that it delivers many more items that I would probably glance over with a typical RSS reader.

adobe air feed reader

The screenshot above only shows you a small portion of my screen. The ticker stretches across your entire screen, either horizontally or vertically, and is always scrolling at your preferred speed. It looks very similar to a sports or stock ticker from your preferred television news source. When you find an item you like, you simply click on it, and a small preview box appears with a link to the post or article itself.

snackr-preview

The preferences are limited, but you pretty much get everything you need. You have the ability to speed up and slow it down as you please, move the ticker to your preferred location, remove items that have obtained a certain age, and also control if the ticker will remain in front of all windows.

snackr

Of course you also have the ability to manage your feeds, including importing via OPML file.

snackr google reader

With all of its perks, there are a few options it lacks.

  • Surprisingly, it can only reside in your taskbar, not your system tray.
  • It needs some additional configuration for managing your feeds. Such as the ability to show only tech items, or news items.
  • It would also be nice if it integrated into your Google Reader or other online reader account, so you wouldn’t have to manually update your feeds in both locations.
  • All together, this RSS reader/ticker is an incredibly useful tool for finding several different articles and posts, that you wouldn’t normally find via Google or other RSS reader. It does require Adobe Air, and a incredibly simple installation, but once you get your feeds imported, it’s smooth sailing from there.

    Do you use Snackr?   If so, what features would you like to see them include?

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    T.J. Mininday

    Hi, my name T.J. and I'm a Techaholic. Since the takeoff of Web 2.0, I have been 'over the top' obsessed with technology, the internet, and just about every single gadget released during that time. Whether reading, watching or listening, I can't get enough. Although the past few years have fueled my obsession, I've loved computers, gaming and all forms of technology since my early teen years(The Early 90s). It took an incredible amount of begging and prodding to push my Dad into purchasing my first $3000 Pentium Pro PC. I was immediately hooked, and I later went on to get a degree in Computer Networking and have been involved in the field ever since. I currently am employed as an IT Field Engineer, and blog part time on TheWindowsFix.com and ConnectedInternet.com. You'll find that I write about many of the same topics as MUO and look forward to contributing to this fantastic blog, for years to come.

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    • Ravi November 20, 2008

      I hate to be the “yes, but” guy but a word of warning: Snackr on a Mac, at least on my MacBook (Mac OS X Leopard), takes up a good 10% of CPU for its scrolling effect (more depending on the scroll speed).

      See:
      http://forum.snackr.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7&p=18&hilit=CPU#p18
      for comments from the developer.

      Otherwise, a really neat app.

      • T.J. Mininday November 20, 2008

        Thanks for the word of warning Ravi…You would think there would be a quick update for something as bad as that.

        • Ravi November 20, 2008

          Howdy T.J! I am glad you found my comment useful. The response from the developer notes that he has optimised his code as much as possible and is waiting on the Adobe folks to respond. He notes that the problem exists only on a Mac, so the majority of readers will not have to worry about this at all, and the Mac folks can tune the scroll speed low to lessen impact on the CPU.

      • Narciso Jaramillo November 25, 2008

        One thing I’m planning to add in the near future is alternative animation options, so you can have items fade in over time instead of constantly scrolling. That should reduce the CPU usage quite a bit.

        Thanks,

        nj

    • ridhoyp November 20, 2008

      wohooo.. make reads so simple.. cool.. :)

    • William November 21, 2008

      I’m an feed junky and last year when I could not find a reader other than googles that had the features I wanted, I decided to build one that matched and bettered the google reader feature set

      At adelph.us we love to read rss feeds and we thought it would be a great idea to integrate a full featured rss/atom feed reader into the adelph.us social communication platform. We looked at some of the available feed readers and while many of them are very good, most lacked some key features that we believe are needed to help members easily add, read, and recycle feeds. At adelph.us we believe that there should be more than one choice for internet users when it comes to key applications like feed readers. We think that a feed reader should be tightly integrated into a unified social communication platform that allows members to use all of the features with one log or openid.

      We believe in the Open Source development community, and because of this in the near future we will be releasing the adelph.us reader under an Open Source license. This means that the adelph.us reader will continue to evolve to meet the needs of users and developers.The adelph.us reader has all of the features that you would expect in a top of the line feed reader. When we started the development process we wanted to make sure that we matched feature for feature with the best feed readers. Once we had the key features list we began to add new features that would make the adelph.us feed reader an easy to use aggregator that gives members the ability to read, share, and republish feeds.

      Some adelph.us Reader Features

      * Feed Reader tightly integrated into adelph.us social communication platform
      * Easy to use and intuitive user interface
      * Add feeds from an existing OPML file
      * Add rss/atom feeds as well as feeds from existing social services
      * Share feed items with a note ( Public, Private, Friend (s), Group(s) )
      * Email feed items with a note
      * Tag feed item
      * Re Publish feed item to blog
      * Re Publish entire feed to blog
      * Tabbed feed viewing
      *Push feed and feed items to “Conversation Channels”
      *Push feed and feed items to twitter
      * Feed viewing options (Bottom, Right, Hide)
      * Integrated feed search
      * Feed Categorization using tags
      * Latest feeds section (Shows feeds from the last 1 hour, 2 hours, 5 hours)

    • Ajay November 21, 2008

      this reader looks very impressive i will definatly give a try to this reader.

    • Narciso Jaramillo November 25, 2008

      Thanks for the review and the suggestions! In the latest test build, Snackr does indeed have integration with Google Reader, and an option to make Snackr minimize to the system tray instead of the taskbar. You can get the latest build (v0.38) here:

      http://code.google.com/p/snackr/downloads/list

      I’m planning to add a way to categorize and filter feeds, so you can show just one feed or all the feeds in a given category. Unfortunately I’ve been busy with my actual job :) , so haven’t had much time lately to work on Snackr, but I’m hoping to get back to it soon.

      nj

      • T.J. Mininday December 1, 2008

        Nice…Google Reader Integration will make it ‘perfect’.!!! Thanks for the update.