I am the consummate news junkie. Give me an office with CNN blaring, NPR going nonstop, a pile of current affairs magazines to inhale, and raw, unprocessed information coming at me from the Net anytime. Happiness is a good news day.
When I came across infoMarket News Ticker on IBM's Web site, I knew I'd found an app that would get a special place on my Start menu. Installation was a breeze. Within a few minutes, I had a stream of live headlines scrolling across the News Ticker bar on the top of my screen. Reuters and ESPN are the first news services offered. I chose the headline categories I wanted to view, opting for breaking news, entertainment, business, international developments basically everything but sports.
Now, as I work my way through daily projects, I watch the rest of the world's events scroll by. When a headline catches my eye, a click of the mouse fetches the article using my browser. I've set my Ticker to update headlines every 10 minutes especially handy when I'm following a particular story. During the vote for the Communications Decency Act, I clung to the Ticker for dear life as I frantically worked on other projects. If I'm feeling impatient, I can click for an update anytime I wish.
So what's not to love about such a clever program? For now, Macs are out of the picture. You need Netscape, NCSA Mosaic, or MS Internet Explorer to view full articles. I can live with that, but I wish IBM would ditch the ads that take up a full third of the news bar and change every 20 seconds or so incredibly annoying. But we news junkies need our fix. What's a little commercial intrusion to the information obsessed?
infoMarket News Ticker: free shareware (but will go commercial sometime in 1996). Available at www.infomkt.ibm.com/ht3/ticker.html.
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