Spectra Visual Newsreader: get your news in bright rainbow colors

by Jay Hathaway May 24th 2008

Are you bored of reading news sites that all look the same, or staring at rows and rows of headlines in your RSS reader? MSNBC has something you might want to see. The new Spectra Visual Newsreader grabs MSNBC stories, color-coded by category, and sends them flying around your screen like index cards in a wind tunnel. Maybe you don't want to get your news this way all the time, but it's fun to play with.

Spectra has three modes: you can put it on automatic and let the camera fly around your floating news stories, or you can leave the camera in place, watching the stories spin. The third mode is the most interesting: it lets you use a webcam to manipulate the stories with "human interaction." Unfortunately, it didn't want to cooperate with a MacBook's built-in iSight.

We don't want to completely write off Spectra, because it's a lot of fun, but it seems like MSNBC put a lot of work into a cool toy that doesn't do too much. Webcam integration in browsing is definitely an interesting trend to explore, so it would be great to see that feature working on more platforms. For now, though, we'll just get our news via RSS.

[via Josh Spear]

Tags: animation, flash, MSNBC, newsreader, spectra

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Arran said 2:32PM on 5-25-2008

what a wicked app!... Now if only someone could port this to adobe air and allow you to add any feeds you wanted. Would choose this over any other rss reader without a doubt.

Anyone up for it ;)?

sandhu said 3:26PM on 5-25-2008

News map is way better.
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm?
its not a rss aggregator, but it grabs headlines from google news. nice interface...

Arran said 11:29AM on 5-26-2008

Just checked that news map flash app out... pretty wicked... going to give it a go over the next few days... stuck it in prism as I have always preferred running apps from my desktop.

Nice one for the pointer buddy!

Gus O. Davis said 3:52PM on 5-25-2008

Totally stupid play toy. I'll stick with my very serious FeedDemon 2.7.0 because I need to catch up on important information not play around with a silly toy.

Gus O. Davis said 3:58PM on 5-25-2008

Totally stupid play toy. I'll stick with my very serious FeedDemon 2.7.0 because I need to catch up on important information not play around with a silly toy.

asurroca said 10:43PM on 5-27-2008

Love the logo, love the execution of the idea. Got to give MSNBC credit for trying something like this out. Not sure how useful it really is, but it certainly looks good, and that counts for something.

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