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Snackr - Bite sized RSS feeds

May 13th 2008 | by James

(34 votes, 4.4/5)

Oh no not another feed reader I hear you cry. Well don’t despair this is a refreshing change and it’s really good. The developer Narciso Jaramillo is a product designer for Adobe Flex, but this is his first attempt at an AIR application – Snackr.

Snackr is a ticker style RSS aggregator that can fit vertically or horizontally on your desktop, and then scrolls random items from your subscriptions across the screen. The scrolled entries are small entries and clicking on an item of interest stops the scrolling and reveals an animated balloon window with more content and a link to the sites original post.

The preferences pane allows you to add feeds or import an OPML file. Options are given for the location of the app and the age of feed items.

It also works well on a multiple monitor setup and has a smooth animation between screens. This is a nice addition and execution of something that can get overlooked.

A good write up and documentation can be found online at the apps site.

It does have some issues like lack of any keyboard navigation, large feeds management and I can’t see it replacing Google Reader for me it certainly is a different app.

Design eye

Snackr looks wonderful scrolling horizontally across or up my desktop. It has a small footprint and can stay on top of other windows if you like. The transparent background looks cool but I would like to be able to alter the transparency. Text is clear and readable and the scroll speed can be altered, although I did like the standard speed setting for my 15” MacBook Pro.

I think the icons is great, an RSS feed icon with a big bite taken out of it!

Technical eye

Snackr is written in Flex 3 and Narciso includes some background information on his approach and the animating of the popup windows here on his personal blog.

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Comments

ravi said on May 13th 2008 at 1.32 pm

Very useful and elegant app. Unfortunately (at least on my MacBook) it snacks not just on RSS feeds but also on the CPU! Uses about 11% CPU continuously (the scrolling I guess!).

nj said on May 13th 2008 at 7.04 pm

ravi—yup, it does use a little more CPU than I’d like. One of the folks on the AIR team suggested I try turning off transparency on the ticker to see if that improves the CPU usage—if it does, I’ll add an option for that.

Alisha said on May 16th 2008 at 1.30 am

I really like Snackr. The CPU usage would be great if it was a little lower, but I can live with it for now.

I would love if I could sync it with Google Reader, so if I read a feed via Snackr, it will mark it as read in Google Reader.

nj said on May 16th 2008 at 5.32 am

Alisha—yup, I would love that too! I currently only really use Snackr on one machine because of this—it’s too much of a pain to copy the database file around to keep multiple machines in sync. A friend of mine offered to implement Google Reader support, so hopefully we’ll get it soon.

James said on May 16th 2008 at 9.54 am

nj,

The Google Reader integration sounds like a good niche idea for Snackr.

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