How I Use NewsHawker
Obviously, I’ve been using NewsHawker longer than anyone. I thought I’d share how I use it on an almost daily basis in hopes of providing potential uses that may not be obvious at first glance.
I often use NewsHawker to read the news items from a variety of Mac-related news sites. I do this directly in NetNewsWire; I don’t switch to NewsHawker. Instead, I select my “Mac News” group in NetNewsWire and then run the “Read Headlines” AppleScript using FastScripts. The “Read Headlines” AppleScript reads the headlines, but not the bodies, of the news item while marking them as read. (This script is included in the help for NewsHawker.) If I’m interested in the news item, I’ll either press the down arrow key on the keyboard or, if I’m not sitting at my computer, click on the down button on the AppleRemote to hear the body for the news item. This is an example of temporarily overriding NewsHawker’s preferences via AppleScript.
I also use NewsHawker to read the BBC News feed. However, there are a couple of topics in which I’m not interested. To accommodate this, I’ve created a Smart List in NetNewsWire that filters out those stories in the BBC News feed. Then, I invoke NewsHawker in the same manner as above, but I use the “Read News” AppleScript. The “Read News” AppleScript reads the headlines and bodies of the news item while marking them as read. This script is also included in the help for NewsHawker. This is an example of leveraging NetNewsWire’s features to filter the news items passed to NewsHawker.
In case you’re curious, I don’t use NewsHawker to read some feeds.
NewsHawker is a relatively simple application that is designed to do one thing and, hopefully, does it well. These simple examples of how I use NewsHawker are intended to illustrate how I leverage the already existing features in NetNewsWire and NewsHawker’s AppleScript to support to read my news in a variety of sophisticated ways.
One more thing, if you have access to Leopard, you want Alex to be reading you the news. Trust me.
