News Anchor For Mac

News Anchor is a unique Mac OS X application designed to read out loud news feed items. It combines a news feed aggregator with a TV news program. The main capabilities are creating news channels using your own feeds that are automatically voiced by news anchor robots.

The application comes with predefined news feed sources as well as channels, which are displayed in an intuitive interface. Moreover, you can play the default channels: Business and Finance, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Showbiz, Technology, World News or create your own.

To add a new channel you must first enter at least one news feed from your favorite site. News feeds can be managed via a panel on the right of the main window. As usual, adding a news feed to News Anchor consists of entering its name, description, feed address and optional User ID and password.

Each feed can be assigned to one of your channels via the news feed editor or the channel editor. An interesting feature is that you can generate any number of episodes and set the minimum and maximum number of episodes to be viewed. After you have set the numbers and assigned news feeds to channels, you are ready to go.

Watching your personalized news channel is really simple. Just click one of them from the initial screen. An animated female or male news anchor will read articles to you. The robot voices are not that pleasant, though, and neither are the images (taken from the article) displayed on-screen.

On the other hand, you have full control over the playback using a simple progress and volume slider and previous / play / pause / next / stop buttons. You can also click on a button to open the news item in your default browser (note that the app itself can not display them) and watch the news in full-screen mode.

To sum up, News Anchor is a news feed aggregator that can read feed items to you in a news program fashion. Although the robot voices and images are of poor quality, you can fully control the playback. The application can come in handy to users with vision impairments or who like hearing rather than reading articles.