This is my old RSS reader updated into an Adobe AIR application. Telexer can follow RSS and twitter news sources, but does not give you information overload or a cluttered desktop.

more info on the telexer site

Simple, small, can do a lot

Blago .telexer is lightweight and simple. There is no manual – it was designed for immediate use and there is hardly any learning curve involved to get the best out of it.

Just feed it a few urls, park its minimal window to the side, and let yourself be notified when your favorite sites have news.

…made for news addicts

This AIR-based feed reader is made for serious news addicts – it’s the lightweight, uncluttered way of getting breaking news. But it lets you easily follow Twitter-generated feeds too, without the need for a twitter-account. Or let yourself be surprised by what others have discoverd when you subscribe to a Digg feed. Get the news in real time like you never did before – as if you’re in the newsroom, sitting right next to the telex machine.

If something you’re interested in has an RSS feed – xml, rss, rdf, atom – with blago.telexer, you can keep up-to-the-minute tabs on what’s happening.

download at the telexer site

Telexer’s forerunner, Blago Rss Reader, was a Flash-and-Screenweaver Windows-only application, published just in time for the start of the Iraq war in 2003. At the time, it was very interesting to see the news come in over the course of the day. In the Reader, news items would show up ungraded by size and prominence, just by order of chronology, for the user to decide what would be the main story of the day. The current application is a complete overhaul of the first version, but the basic experience of sitting on top of the news telex is still there.

Notes from the Rss Newsreader project in 2003:

Back when the Columbia had just crashed, and the Iraq War was looming, I felt really badly needed a small application that would warn me of breaking news while I was working. So I made this app for my personal use. It has a little MSN-style popup to notify when there is news: it detects a new item in the rss-feeds I’m interested in.

This flash based *real* application was made with Flash MX and the wonderful flash tool Screenweaver. [note: they are currently "asleep"; make that: defunct]
The app can read public rss newsfeeds for rss versions 0.91, 092, and 2.0, and some 1.0 and rdf feeds as well. RDF is usually coded such a way that special characters will not show correctly in Flash. The app shows feeds, news items and their descriptions.
A channel will reload after the fixed interval of one hour, or after pressing the shortcut reload button. When reloading, a little MSN-style popup warns of new items arriving in the feed’s item list.