The BBC didn't seem to feel it necessary to produce a Macintosh version of their news 'Ticker'. They still haven't responded to any of my emails to them regarding the existence of this application, so here is my attempt and also my first venture into programming on the Macintosh.
If you find any bugs or have any requests for further development, please feel free to contact me.
How do I use it?
Auntie fully supports Balloons - Enable them in the 'Help' menu if required.
After decompressing, copy the Auntie application to your hard drive, then double click on it.
When connected to the internet, Auntie will attempt to connect to the BBC, retrieve the news headlines and process them. You should then see the news scroll by.
Click-drag left and right on the scrolling text to 'speed-scroll' the news back and forth. (G3 users. If this is still too fast. Let me know.)
When a blue hypertext link that interests you scrolls by, control-click, select 'Read this news' and your browser should spring to life and display a more in-depth article from the BBC website.
Preferences:
You may find turning on Balloon help whilst the preferences window is open helps.
Appearance
Here you can change the speed the ticker scrolls at and the position on your screen that the ticker window appears at.
Topics
These checkboxes can be used to filter out the news that does not interest you. In the example above I have decided not to view sport, weather or travel news. These settings take affect the next time the headlines are fetched from the internet.
Connection
Some Internet Service Providers (ISP) dictate that you use a proxy server to fetch data from the internet. If this is the case with your ISP then you will need to tick the ‘Proxy Server’ checkbox and enter the proxy server address and port number in the corresponding boxes.
In this section you can also determine how often you would like your headlines updated. ‘Update on loop’ causes the headlines to update every time the current headlines have scrolled past (not recommended for modem users) and ‘Update every:’ allows you to specify in minutes how often you would like your news updated. The latter option is probably more useful since the BBC recommend a period of 15 minutes with their PC based news ticker.
Launch on startup
Ticking this will create an ‘alias’ in your system startup folder causing Auntie to load every time you turn on your Macintosh.
Disclaimer:
To the best of my knowledge, this application will cause no harm to the data contained on your hard drive. Use of Auntie is at your own risk.
Neither myself nor the development of this application are associated with the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). All correspondence regarding this application should be sent to myself.
