Desktop Buddy: Help

Syndication Feeds

Your Desktop Buddy will keep you up to date with the latest news from your favourite syndication feeds. The Buddy character will read out loud the latest items as they occur. In addition, you can open any news feeds and your Buddy will read the headlines or you can turn to the full items and either read the page yourself or get your Buddy to do it. Desktop Buddy offers a simple yet flexible and powerful news reader.

Desktop Buddy supports both RSS and Atom news feeds.

Subscribing to a News Feed

You can subscribe to any number of news feeds. To get started, click on the Feeds button or Actions menu item on the main Desktop Buddy window. This will open the Syndication Feeds Dialog.

To subscribe to a news feed, click on the New Feed button. The New Syndication Feed Dialog opens.

You must know the URL of the feed. You can type it in by hand if you wish. However, the easiest way is to use your usual web browser to find the web page containing a link to the news feed. Right click with the mouse on the link and, from the popup menu, choose either 'Copy Link Location' (Firefox) or 'Copy Shortcut' (Internet Explorer). Then click on the Paste button next to the URL text box.

Next you must decide how often Desktop Buddy should check the feed for new items. Enter the number of minutes between successive calls. It is tempting to read the feeds frequently but each call will download the feed and use up valuable bandwidth. Of course, the longer you choose to poll a particular feed, the more new items will appear when you eventually visit. The time you choose will be a compromise.

If you need to amend the feed's URL or change the polling interval, you can select the feed from the table in the Syndication Feeds Dialog and press the Edit button. This will open the dialog enabling you to change the feed's details.

Reading a Feed

When you first subscribe to a news feed or when you select a feed in the table and click on the Show Feed button, the Reader Dialog will open with the latest items from the feed as its contents.

The Reader Dialog functions in the same way as it does for eBooks, web pages and text files. You can simply press the Play button and your Buddy will read the contents to you. If you click on any of the headlines, which act as hyperlinks to the web page containing the full news story, the corresponding web page will open. From the Options menu, you can choose whether to have such links open in your default web browser (for better HTML rendering) or in the Reader itself. The latter option means that the page is available for your Buddy to read to you.

Polling Feeds

Without any action required by you, Desktop Buddy will check each of your feeds, at regular intervals, looking for new items. You decide the frequency of these visits for individual feeds by setting the polling interval, either when you first subscribe to the feed or when you edit its details.

If there are any new items, your Buddy will read them out to you. If there are many items, they will only read the first few but they will indicate that there are others. If you want to know what the others are you can simply open the feed in the Reader Dialog as described above.

As with task reminders, if your Buddy has to interrupt reading an eBook or a web page in order to inform you of the latest news, you can have them resume from where they left their reading by again clicking on the Play button in the Reader Dialog.

Available Commands

The following commands are available in the Syndication Feeds Dialog and enable you to manage your subscription to news feeds.

Feed Menu

Refresh List Refreshes the list of feeds to which you have subscribed.

New Launches the New Syndication Feed Dialog so that you can subscribe to a new news feed.

Edit Opens the Edit Syndication Feed Dialog enabling you to change the details, including the polling interval, for the selected feed.

Show Causes the Reader Dialog to open, revealing the contents of the selected news feed. This allows you to open links to the full news stories either in the Reader itself or in your default web browser.

Delete Deletes the selected feed, terminating your subscription.