Introducing NewsHawker 1.0 Beta
NewsHawker, the first application from Sugar Maple Software, has recently reached beta.
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Do you spill your breakfast cereal on your keyboard or yourself while trying to eat and read your news at the same time? Does your keyboard get sticky from your dirty fingers as you eat pizza and advance to the next news item in your news reader? If so, NewsHawker can help you read more news while keeping your keyboard clean.
NewsHawker reads you your news so you can focus on other tasks. NewsHawker extends the functionality of NetNewsWire to speak the news items in NetNewsWire. NewsHawker is configurable. Do you want to read just the headlines of the news items? No problem. Just the bodies? Sure. Read the bodies of some items as their headlines are being read? Certainly. Open certain items in your browser if they sound interesting? Of course.
NewsHawker has a single window that can be used to control all of its functionality. In addition, NewsHawker can be controlled via the keyboard or AppleScript.
The Apple Help documentation for NewsHawker briefly introduces its operation and various features.
This application will be a commercial application when it is released. The price has not yet been determined.
NewsHawker requires Mac OS X v. 10.4 or later.
I would greatly appreciate any feedback that you would provide on NewsHawker.
While all feedback is welcome, here are a couple of questions to consider:
- Do you think NewsHawker is a useful application for you? Why or why not?
- Do you regularly read news items in NetNewsWire? If not, do you use another feed aggregator?
- Any recommendations for improving the user interface?
- Any missing features that you would consider highly desirable for the first release?
Please feel free to download NewsHawker 1.0.0b2.
Please send any feedback to .
January 15th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Nice little app. Congrats on the beta!
Have you considered putting some sort of separation (some silent time might be enough) between the posts? I found myself having to look to see that it was reading a new post.
Another feature I’d appreciate would be to filter out (or maybe in?) NNW groups. All my comics are in a “comics” group. It doesn’t make sense for NH to try to read these images
I also have a group for “important” things. These are things that my eyes should see. Make sense?
Anyway, looks useful! if only you could steal the new voice from Leo and bring it to Tiger
One more suggestion: make the main features (play/pause/open in browser) available via the dock menu.
January 15th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
BrianC, thanks for your feedback!
I do have a short pause between the headline and the body (done with @”[[inpt PHON]]%%%[[inpt TEXT]]” for those who are interested), but I should be sure to pause between posts. Your system must be quite fast
If there is a selection in NetNewsWire, NewsHawker will only read the posts in that selection. There is currently a bug where NewsHawker doesn’t read all of the posts in the selection contains multiple groups. Perhaps fixing this bug would address your use case….
Yeah, “Alex” is amazing
I created a job to make the main features accessible via the dock menu. Good idea!
January 16th, 2007 at 6:45 am
Congrats on the beta release!
And thanks for blogging about your progress. It’s very motivational to the rest of us that have yet to get our first Cocoa-based product out the door.