StayInformed is a program which collects news items from various sources and displays them for you. The basic idea is to have constantly updated news items from a variety of sources, including audio and video sources all displayed at once so you can sit back and watch and listen. When an item of interest is shown, you can select it to see (or hear) the entire story.
Because there is so much being shown at once, Stayinformed works best on large screens. It may not look good on screens smaller than 1280x1024, although it will run. It runs on Windows XP or later. It has not been tested on versions of Windows prior to XP, although it may run on some.
As
shown in the screenshot above, directly underneath the window border
is a menu bar and underneath that is a small area where a stock
market summary is optionally displayed. Underneath that is an area
which consists of 2 or 3 areas which cycle through brief descriptions
of stories on selectable topics. Each description is shown for a
period of time (approximately 10 seconds), during which a link is
available to bring up a web browser showing the complete story.
The middle area has four sections. The left part shows the data sources. They are color-coded according to whether their content is HTML (web pages), audio, or video. These sources are periodically scanned for new articles. While the scanning is taking place, each source is displayed in yellow, but this can be turned off in the Preferences settings if it is found to be distracting. Clicking on a source brings up a pop-up menu. This menu is explained more in the next section.
To the right of the sources, audio news items are displayed. Clicking on one of these will cause it to be played. To the right of that, video news items are displayed. Clicking on one of these will cause it to be played in the video player window at the lower right.
To the right of the video news items area is an area where the weather forecast is displayed. The area to display is selected in the Preferences settings.
The bottom left area shows a list of news items, either from a single source or according to topic. Clicking on an item will show its description in the bottom right area. The bottom right area is used for showing news article details. It has several tabs, which can show text descriptions, play audio files, display video files, or show live video.
StayInformed primarily uses RSS feeds for its data sources (but don't worry if you don't know what that means). Stock market info, weather, and live video are obtained from other places. The program comes with an initial set of sources defined, but you can change this by using options from the Sources menu. These options are the following:
Choose from list. At Zzornix.net, we maintain a web service containing a list of sources which have been found to work well with StayInformed. These sources are categorized and identified as to whether they are normal web text, audio, or video. Certain other parameters (which are described later) are set as well. All you have to do is pick the source from the list.
Get Initial Recommended set. This basically restores the initial list, although since the list is obtained from the web service, it is subject to change.
Enter manually. If you know the URL of an RSS source, you can enter it here.
Remove all. This removes all sources. After this, you'll need to enter some manually or choose them from the list.
Individual sources may be removed or edited by clicking on them in the middle section of the display and making the appropriate selection from the pop up menu.
Entering a source manually or editing an existing source brings up the following dialog box:
When entering a new source all of the fields will be blank; when editing an existing source they will be filled in with current values. Note that when you add a source from the list obtained from the web service, all of these fields are set for you.
The meaning of the fields is:
Description: Any text to describe the source.
URL: a web url which defines where the source is.
Media: HTML for normal web pages, Audio for audio sources, or Video for video sources. This field is used to color-code the source in the sources display area.
Playback: Web Browser, Audio Player, or Video Player. This field determines how the items from this source are to be displayed. Usually this will match the Media field, but some sources may show video which needs to be shown embedded in a web page, in which case the media would be Video, but the playback would be Web Browser.
Category: This is a value such as News, Weather, or Sports, which is used to organize sources for display. For example, in the cycling headline display windows, a category must be selected, and all sources in that category will be considered for display (but see the next field).
Auto Display: If this is an HTML source (Media = HTML), items from it will be shown in the cycling headline display when it's category is selected. For an audio or video source, checking this is meaningless.
Show Latest: For audio and video sources, the latest item from this source will be shown on the Audio or Video tab in the lower right-hand corner. This is meant for news sources which have regularly updated broadcasts where only the most recent one is really of any interest.
As shown in the first screenshot, the center part of the display shows each of the sources, color-coded as to the media type. Clicking on a source brings up the following pop-up menu:
Show
Items: The items from this source will be shown in the list in the
lower left corner.
Remove This Source: The source will be deleted.
Edit Source Properties: The Edit Source dialog box will be displayed and changes can be made to the description, url, media type, etc.
Check for updates: The source will be scanned immediately to see if there are any new items. Normally, sources are scanned periodically according the the scan interval which is set for the source.
Near the top of the window, underneath the menu bar and stock market display area, two or three cycling headline displays are shown. These look like this:
The
drop-down list at the top left is used to pick a category of items to
display. To the right of that is a check box which is used to limit
the items shown to those that were found today. (Note: this is when
the item was found, not when it was published. So if the program
hasn't been run for a long time, many of the items will be found
today.)
The View link opens a web browser window with the item contents displayed.
The Pause button stops the cycling so you can read a long description.
In
the lower left corner, the item list is displayed.
Items can be displayed from a particular category, from a single data source, or all items can be displayed. Also, the display can be restricted to items found recently, by number of hours.
If Auto Update is checked, new items are added to the list as they are found.
In the lower right corner, a multi-purpose window is shown. Several tabs are available, showing different information.
Shown above is a description of an item selected in the list to the left of this window. Because the data source has a playback type of Web Browser, only the View in Browser button is enabled. Clicking this button will open up a web browser window.
The Audio tab is automatically selected when an audio news item is chosen from the list in the middle row, or when the Play Audio button is clicked in an item description.
Like the Audio tab, the Video tab is automatically selected when a video news item is chosen from the list in the middle row or when the Show Video button is clicked in an item description.
The Live Video tab shows a live video source selected in the Preferences dialog.
By default, this is set to display CNN live video. There is a “Show in Window” button available which will display this video in a separate window. For some reason that has yet to be determined, CNN will sometimes display an error message saying that it can not connect to the video source, but showing it in a separate window seems to work in those cases.
Selecting Preferences from the Tools menu brings up the following dialog box.
The meaning of the various options is as follows.
Show Stock Market Summary – Controls whether the stock market summary is shown at the top of the display. If selected, this display will be updated every five minutes.
ZIP code for weather – Selects the area for which weather forecasts are to be retrieved.
Number of cycling headline displays – 2, 3, or 4 headline displays can be selected.
Highlight sources when updating. If you find the once per minute highlighting of the data sources as they are scanned, you can uncheck this item.
Show Live Video at Startup - If selected, the Live Video tab in the lower right corner will be shown at startup, and live video from the selected source will be shown.
Live Video Source: This is preset to CNN video, but if you know of another live video source, you can select it here.
Clear Database in the Tools Menu removes all items from the database. Items will be added back in as each source is scanned. Normally there is no need to do this, as old items are automatically removed when the data source is scanned and they are no longer found. If the data appears to contain old items or items are displayed out of order, choosing this may fix the problem. After this is done, on the next scan (about once per minute) all items will be reloaded from all sources.
There are no major changes in functionality from the previous version. The following changes were made:
The layout has been changed to reduce the amount of space taken up by the sources display and the log window has been removed. The audio and video sources lists now have permanent space instead of being in the tabs at the lower right corner.
The auto purge option is gone. Auto purge is always on. This option was confusing and not very useful.
Live Video has changed to attempt to work around a problem. See the Live Video section above for how it works.
An option to check for program updates has been added.