Keep on top of the news. (Desktop News) (Company Business and Marketing)

Desktop News 1.0

   Desktop News   Empire State Building   350 Fifth Ave., 77th Fl.   New York, NY 10118   212-290-5000   Fax: 212-290-5081   www.desktopnews.com 

Requires: 4MB hard drive space; Windows 3.x, Windows 95, or Windows NT

Price: Free

Desktop News scrolls headlines from personalized news "channels" across the top of your screen.

Push technology may be the darling of popular Web-based news services, but clogging your company's network bandwidth with late-breaking stories from the surface of Mars or the halls of Wall Street won't endear you to your network administrator. If Internet connection bandwidth and data storage are at a premium at your worksite, Desktop News affords you the opportunity to keep current without angering your workgroup.

To use Desktop News, you must download a 1MB install program. The installation wizard walks you quickly and easily through the install process. Installation and setup, including picking our desired news channels, took less than 10 minutes.

When activated, Desktop News commandeers the top tenth of your display with a scrolling marquee that serves up headlines from customized "channels" of information. When we took Desktop News for a test spin, the channel content providers included CNN, Fox News Network, C/Net, and MS/NBC. As more providers become available, they can be added to the client software's channel listings by clicking on an "add channel" button on the content provider's or Desktop News' site.

If you see an item of interest scrolling by, a quick click on the marquee invokes your favorite Web browser and sends you to the Web page that houses the story selected. Getting to the meat of the news items takes a bit more time than "push" news programs like PointCast, since nothing has been prefetched to your hard drive, but that is a small price to pay for minimizing unnecessary network traffic.

The Desktop News marquee can be modified slightly to suit individual tastes. Three display styles (Standard, Modern, and Stealth) offer minor changes to the marquee's appearance. You can control and vary both the scrolling speed of headlines and the amount of processor resources Desktop News is allowed to use when other applications are active. The AutoHide function slides the marquee up and out of sight until it is brought down. Unfortunately, unlike MyYahoo's NewsTicker (a similar onscreen news ticker), there is no support for custom fonts, and the marquee cannot be resized.

Desktop News, like other interactive news services, is funded by advertisers, whose presence is made known by small ads nestled between the headlines. There are also hot-button links to advertiser sites that are installed by default in the Desktop News display area. The latter can be removed from sight with a few mouse clicks.

The Desktop News Web site reports that future enhancements will include streaming audio, a news-driven screen saver, and support for extracting content from news providers that require logon IDs and passwords. As it is, Desktop News is a good way to keep tabs on what's happening in the world with a minimum investment of computer and network resources.