News Notifications

News Notifications is a small application specifically designed for the Notification Center, introduced in Mac OS X Mountain Lion, to display articles from your favorite RSS feeds.

The application comes with The Verge, one of my favorites, already loaded. By default, only 5 articles are shown, and the feeds are refreshed every 1 minute, but this can all be changed from the Preferences window.

The Notification Center can be accessed by clicking on its button in the top-right corner of the screen, or you can set a hotkey from System Preferences. It should be noted that News Notifications settings don't supersede your system preferences, so if you only have Notification Center configured to show the last 5 stories, it won't matter how many you choose in this application.

Scrolling through your news is a breeze from the Notification Center. Each article shows the time it was published, its title and the name of the RSS feed. All your RSS stories will be shown at the bottom of your list of notifications, but this can also be changed from your Notification Center.

A News Notifications icon can be found on the menubar when the application is running, from where you can refresh all your feeds, access the feed history and mute notifications, which come in the form of pop-ups.

To sum up, this application makes interesting use of the Notification Center. I like the idea, but I couldn't find a way to keep the Notification Center open; it automatically closes when you switch to another application. All the RSS feeds that I tried were added without any problems and the articles were downloaded quite smoothly.