14 DAY TRIAL // News. Everything revolves about getting the latest information about anything. Information is power said somebody. And it is so true. Information has found a new way to travel. Internet proved to be a very fast way to the news you want and check the credibility of the information.
RSS feeds are no longer a novelty and people with different skills in what concerns Internet browsing are beginning to use them more and more often. They are like a personal news agency that gives you on a platter every title published on a website. Most RSS readers are equipped with compressing tools that will keep a certain number of news available for future reading. The general tendency is that the more features such a program has, the more expensive it is.
News Messenger however is a simple instrument designed to read RSS and Atom feeds and it can even parse HTML pages. This means that it can read headlines from pages that do not support syndication. This is a great feature as there still are websites that do not support RSS feeding. During the installation, News Messenger will not provide you with an option of placing an icon on your desktop nor will it ask you if you want such an option. After installation, it will find a place in the system tray and try not to be too intrusive.
The application comes free of charge so from the beginning you should expect something simple and functional. There is no interface and the software's minimalist looks are restricted to displaying the pieces of news downloaded from the websites defined by the user. The news headlines are displayed in a side bar and in chunks of five. The first option available in here is choosing the address you want to view the information from. Next you are shown the number of news available and a brief description (usually only the title and subtitle of the news is shown).
Clicking on one of the items will result in opening the news in the default browser. The number of items displayed in the sidebar can be modified from the options menu available in the context menu of the tray icon, together with other useful options.
General options allow you to change the language of the application and the choices are a bit arid as only English and Portuguese are available. Appearance settings include defining the maximum number of news to be displayed for each site (a 0 value will disable this option) and setting a value for setting the transparency of the sidebar (0 is total opacity). The latter is particularly useful as the sidebar is set to appear on top of all other windows (can become inconvenient in some cases).
Sites tab in Options displays all the websites the RSS subscription is for. News Messenger comes with a number of subscriptions, but the user can remove them and add some of his/her own. When adding a new feed for the aggregator to read you will have to set the extraction type (Atom, RSS, RDF or HTML) and provide the desired URL. Once all these options have been configured, a new link will appear in the sites list. The order is alphabetical but due to the up and down controls available you can move them in any order you want. The order of the sites in here will be the same as the one in the sidebar.
The last setting you can make in the Options menu is proxy related (if it is the case). News Messenger is also equipped with OPML (Outline Processor Marrkup Language) exporting and importing options. This feature allows you to exchange the lists of RSS feeds with other RSS readers.
The Good
News Messenger is a very simple and functional RSS reader. There is not too much to configure and you can control the refresh from the context menu of the tray icon.
Exporting options are important as some day you may want to change the present RSS reader and keep the links.
The Search option allows you to search among the retrieved titles for the desired word or expression.
The Bad
The sidebar containing all the headlines is not too flexible and stands on top of all windows. It cannot be resized in any way and the only option for hiding it is to close it.
The user cannot set a news refresh rate and this operation has to be done manually.
The Truth
News Messenger will retrieve all the titles from the links you are providing and it will not intrude too much with your working on the computer, except for the stiff sidebar containing all the news.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
