Chanpory Rith
Sep 4, 2006
If you’re feeling guilty for not keeping up with the news, try Newsmap. The site varies headlines by size and color depending on how much coverage a news item gets. This lets you quickly see top news items as well as biases and trends in news coverage. You can see Newsmap with a flick of the finger by combining it with Exposé and WebDesktop. Here’s how:
1. Download WebDesktop
- WebDesktop (It’s free)
2. Set up WebDesktop
Go to the WebDesktop menu and choose “Open URL” and enter “http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm” in the field. Press “OK”
Expand the WebDesktop window to the size you want.
Go to the WebDesktop menu and choose “Preferences” and set your desired opacity and refresh time.
3. Set Exposé preferences
Go to the “Dashboard and Exposé” preference pane in “System Preferences”.
In the “Active Screen Corners” area, choose the corner you want to use to reveal the desktop.
Once you’ve set everything up, just move your mouse pointer to a corner of the screen to reveal the news. Now you’ve got no excuse to keep up with what’s going on in the world!
18 Comments
Skud
6:46 pm
Fine if you’re American I guess. Not much use elsewhere, if you can’t customise it to use your own country’s news feeds.
Chanpory
6:49 pm
Skud, actually you can. Check out the tabs at the top of Newsmap. ;-). You can view news for Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, and the UK. It’s actually quite interesting to see what news gets more coverage in various countries. Hope that helps.
RayCon
6:51 pm
Um, if you activate Exposé to show the desktop, it’ll hide WebDesktop as well. Am I missing something here?
Chanpory
6:58 pm
Hey RayCon, WebDesktop should remain on the desktop if it’s not the foremost application when you use Exposé to show the desktop.
Skud
9:07 pm
Bzzzt. Choosing Australia, I see a postage-stamp sized bit of “national” news in the lower right, and an enormous “ERNESTO SOAKS NC” in the upper left under “world” news. Localised content seems to take up about 10-15% of the screen real estate, and only a few headlines are readable.
tunaranch
9:31 pm
This is pretty cool, but I love my rotating background wallpapers too much to change, but can see myself keeping this in a separate browser window, so every time I use expose I can see if there’s anything interesting.
Minefield’s also throwing a popup blocked message on each refresh, even though I’ve told it to allow popups from that site. Oh well, Alpha software, I guess. shrug
I wonder if someone will hack something similar that shows stories from digg/fark or similar.
Andy
2:43 am
Very cool guys, love it, thanks!
Fornya
3:28 am
I’ve been visiting Newsmap for a little more than a year. It’s a really great way to soak up information.
mark
9:33 am
that’s a good one…thanks!
k0dy
12:41 pm
Real nice site. It sure would be nice if they let you setup your own news sources/blogs, then compare that to international news headlines to figure out the most ‘popular’ items.
cya
Karen
5:43 am
I recently found your site…this news page is great - thanks!!
Tawny
7:42 pm
i don’t know if anyone else is reminded of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, but this little guy makes me feel like Ozymandias and his hundreds of TVs, trying to get a feel for what the world was thinking.
but i think i may love my BoC desktop too much for this to be permanent. =(
Matt Turner
10:31 am
Er, fatal error for me. When I expose I can’t click on the links to open them. But then if I select the application then it reloads it all over again. In short, it’s easier opening the page in Safari.
Craig
9:46 am
Mac doesn’t help. I need this in a PC version.
Chanpory
12:02 pm
Craig, Windows has a similar feature built-in called ActiveDesktop. You can enable it in the Display control panel. Check out the instructions here:
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000593.htm
Craig
8:23 am
Thank you. I have enabled ActiveDesktop. Now what?
Chanpory
9:58 am
Now add the URL of Newsmap to your desktop. To do this, check out the last part in the instructions from the link I posted in the previous comment.
Note: you probably won’t be able to fade the site into the background, as you can on a mac. So it’ll be full opacity.
Craig
10:54 am
Apologies for sounding like a dolt. Serious brain fade today.