Auntie

Auntie is a freeware BBC News ticker for MacOS X. It has no relationship to the (apparently no longer supported) MacOS 7 program of the same name, other than having the same function.

Many aspects of the ticker are configurable, including font, color, opacity and ticker speed. Clicking on a scrolling headline will take you to the associated web page. Headlines are also listed in a dock menu to jump to any one of them.

Auntie is provided free of charge because you really ought to pay attention to what's going on in the world.

New in version 1.1 is an option to have Auntie read the news headlines to you when new ones are detected, and a built-in browser for the BBC audio streams page. You MUST have Apple's Safari 1.0 web browser installed for the streams browser to work. Also, a different ticker algorithm is being used to reduce the amount of CPU load that Auntie creates, as well as make it easier to read the headlines.

Finally, this version fetches the BBC's RSS feed instead of the smaller ticker feed they display on their site. This means there are more headlines, and more diverse topics (includes sports and more international news).

• Auntie is only set up to use the default Speech voice to read headlines. Choices will be forthcoming.
• It needs to make the system menu with the headlines optional, instead of always displayed.

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