Mesa Dynamics Releases Tickershock 1.0, Animated RSS and Atom News Reader for Mac OS X
Washington, DC – September 21, 2004 – Mesa Dynamics today released Tickershock, an interactive RSS and Atom news headline reader inspired by the news crawls of 24-hour cable news channels.
RSS and Atom are emerging news syndication formats for providing short summaries of web site content. Originally embraced by the web log ("blog") community as an ideal way of informing readers of new entries, syndicated news feeds are now being delivered by mainstream media sites such as Wired, CNET and The New York Times.
Featuring animated crawl and billboard displays, Tickershock is a departure from typical RSS applications that emulate web browser or email reader environments. Focusing on the "push" nature of the technology, Tickershock aims to be a passive experience only until the user decides a headline is worth exploring: a double-click on a news headline brings up a "News Inspector" from which one can explore a story in greater depth.
Other features in Tickershock include configurable "Themes" for storing multiple crawl and billboard settings, customizable "Channels" for storing distinct news feed subscriptions, OPML news feed import and support for multi-byte languages such as Japanese. Tickershock also leverages the abilities of other Mesa Dynamics applications to allow one-click access to Internet image searching and data mining pertaining to any selected news content.A trial version of Tickershock is available for download at http://www.mesadynamics.com and requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 (Jaguar) or later. A single user license of Tickershock is available for $19.95.