Wouldn’t it be great if you could keep up to date with your favorite weblog without having to constantly refresh Safari, or scan through an e-mail inbox for the daily headlines? Well guess what; you can. I only discovered this convenient feature a few days ago myself, but built into Mac OS X is the ability to add a website’s RSS Feed as your computer’s screensaver so you can keep up to date with the latest headlines as soon as your screen saver is triggered to appear. Intrigued? Of course you are, so let us show you how it’s done.
First, open System Preferences, either via the Apple logo in the menu bar or the Applications folder. From there, select the second option—Desktop & Screen Saver—and select the Screen Saver tab.
You’ll now be presented with a selection of available screen savers, including ones to show album artwork from your iTunes library or to show the “word of the day.” We’re focusing on the fifth one in the list: RSS Visualizer. Once you’ve selected it, you’ll notice that the default uses the “Hot News” RSS feed from the Apple website. To get the latest news and information from Appletell, you’ll need to replace the current feed URL with this:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/appletell/
Now you can select Done and either preview the screen saver or simply close System Preferences all together and look forward to the next appearance. When the opening of an article is shown in the screen saver, you can read the full piece by pressing ‘1’ on the keyboard. This will end the screen saver and load the article in the default browser.
Quite a nifty trick, wouldn’t you say?
hi,
nice trick if it worked.
though it allows you to change the url etc. it always reverts back to what it was, it does not save the changes i.e. http://feeds.feedburner.com/appletell/, so what is the solution?
thx
Hi Rolf,
I'm afraid that we haven't been experiencing the issue that you described above. If the RSS feed address is typed correctly, you can check that it works by testing the screen saver. If this shows the Appletell RSS feed, there's no reason that I can see why it shouldn't hold the settings.
Just make sure that you're logged in as an administrator on your computer, otherwise you may not be able to make the required changes.
Ed
the key is MacOS (latest 10.64) screensaver only keeps a new RSS feed IF you change the "current" one, not any other.
i am the admin. os it should work.
still, if you change the name, then the url reverts back to default, but name does not keep changes i.e. AppleTell, so i can only change the feed for AppleTell and it works in screensaver, but name is still same as it was i.e. ABC News.
MacOS is supposed to be friendly, flexible, surely, there must be a way to add your own feeds vs. changing them?!
thanks,
rolf