Once in a blue moon, something comes up that you can’t resist trying. We caught wind of such an application. Particls or PARTiCLS (with an italicized i) is a desktop application that churns news alert gathered from all of the Internet. News catered to your interests will be served by a news ticker-ish bar on top of your desktop. This is every news junkie’s dream come true - 24/7 updated news every single second!

The awesomeness of Particls is just too great to keep to ourselves. With some spare time to kill, only a multi segmented review about Particls would do it justice. Here’s PART 1 - The Basics.

Off we go to http://www.particls.com/ and download Particls. We recommend you visit the website for a look see while downloading the 2.6MB installer.

The installer allows you to automatically download the required .NET Framework 2.0 within the wizard without you going to wade through Microsoft’s website. Props for the convenience. However, midway through the .NET installation, it required all the .NET related applications to be closed - yes, this meant the Particls installer wizard as well. As the interfaced has been disabled, we were forced to manually terminate the wizard via Windows Task Manager (aka Ctrl+Alt+Del). Fortunately the .NET installer was a separate application and was able to resume operations. There was also the issue of critical windows files being replaced by unrecognized versions. Took the leap and chose to ignore it. Hope that this issue was an isolated case.

With slightly dampen expectations, Particls installer was again launched and completed. I’ll skip the installation process; basically the only point of interest was whether you allow it to be integrated to your Internet browser, extending your customizing options. Finally, it ran.

To be precise, it crawled - took quite a while for Particls news bar to launch. We greeted with a message informing us to add keywords … but where? Ah, clicking the text on the bar reveals an interface to add ‘Watch Words’, keywords for news alerts that you would like to see. The process was wonderfully simple; wizard-like instructions will guide you through while you type. It kept our interest in adding more words Soon after, the news ticker starts churning alerts and alerts and more alerts.

Pick watch words wisely as it determines the amount of relevant news shown. Choosing popular words like ‘Microsoft’ and ‘Google’ helps Particls gather more alerts. From our brief experience, we’ll wager the alerts shown are pretty accurate. Even stuff about Yahoo was shown though it wasn’t included among the watch words. By the time we were done adding the watch words, the news ticker moved practically non-stop. Over time, the news will get repeated again but you probably might not notice it among the vast sea of alerts.

Left click the news title to open the full news in your browser. Hovering over the news items will show more information. Right click the area within the ‘more information’ and be surprised by the many ways to deal with the news item. Choose to share the item with platforms such as Digg, Reddit, Furl and such. Remove the item or the source, it’s up to you. Perhaps you would like to show less or more of such content? Afterwards blog about it and copy descriptions along with the URLs with a click. Do you hear geeks singing praises in one accord?

Next up - delving deeper into the controls and options. Stay tuned!

Tags: Desktop, Guides, Particls, Reviews, RSS, Tool, Web2.0

Response to “Particls Review Part 1 - The Basics”

Please spend a moment to join the discussion or trackback from your site

Featured Media