In the ever growing world of media publishing, the launch of branded news readers is a radical innovation. This unobtrusive application will bring Web links, news, video clips and podcast directly to the end users desktop. The concept is based on the demystification of the RSS format, read, manage and archive your rss, rdf and Atom feeds comfortably and easily. We made the software interface as simple and easy to use as possible.

This is the new wave of instantaneous synchronized news update from your favorite Web sites. This version is the first release on CNET Download.com.

Editor's review of Netsplorer

This headline crawl offers a nice change of pace from the run-of-the-mill interfaces on most RSS feeds.

Netsplorer adds an unobtrusive bar to the top of your screen (it will minimize to your system tray, but we weren't able to drag the maximized bar to any other location), where it displays headlines from your selected RSS news sources as a crawl. If you want more than just the headline, you can click that title to quickly open the source news page in your default browser. The program displayed no problems in performance.

The bells and whistles are minimal, but the options that are available were all we really needed. We were able to adjust the speed of the crawl easily, as well as its transparency, background color, and font. Adding and removing feeds also was a snap.

Netsplorer worked fine under XP, but we couldn't get it up and running under Vista, despite the publisher's remarks. All the same, anyone interested in trying a different sort of interface for his or her RSS feeds should give this free, easy-to-use headline crawl a chance.