Vocero

Vocero is an Apple Dashboard Widget that brings news from your favorite sites and blogs to your desktop and reads them out loud for you. It can combine news from any number of RSS-compatible sites you have added in your Safari bookmarks.
Download
Version 1.3
Vocero

Features

RSS

Combine news from all your favorite sources.

Choose one or more of your favorite RSS sources from a list (your Safari bookmarks) and Vocero will combine and display news from all of them. By supporting feeds in RSS 0.9x, 1.0 and 2.0 format, it is compatible with most news sites and blogs.

Speaker

Don't read, just listen.

When you click the Play button, Vocero will start reading the headers (and optionally the summaries) of the displayed news using the Mac OS X synthesized voices. You can keep working, cooking, exercising or whatever you do while you listen to the news of your choice.

Speaker

Live searching.

If you want to read news about a specific subject, just type in some letters in the search box and the displayed news will be interactively updated to show only the ones that contain what you are looking for.

Safari icon

Safari RSS integration.

You won't have to search the Internet again for the news sites you already use or find out the long internet address of feeds. The list of available RSS sources is taken from your Safari bookmarks of RSS feeds. More info.

Online Help

What is RSS?

Why should you go from site to site to read its news? Why should you see them in the format they chose? RSS is a format that allows news sites, blogs and any other site that generates information to publish it in a standard way without any visual format attached. This way, you can use any RSS aggregation software to concentrate news from your favorite sources and display them in the format you want. RSS feeds of the news sites and blogs are often identified by the XML and RSS icons.

Vocero is an RSS aggregation widget that fetches news from any number of RSS sources, combines them, orders them by date, displays them in a uniform format and reads them out loud for you. This way, you can have the all the news you want in one place and just listen to them.

More information about the RSS format.

Getting Started

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you're using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you're using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

The first time you run Vocero, it will load your Safari bookmarks and will choose the first one as the source of news. You can choose other sources and adjust other preferences by clicking the small "i" icon that appears in the bottom-right corner of the widget.

To start listening to the news, click the Play button located at the bottom-left corner. It will start reading the news from the selected one or from the first one if none was selected. It will keep speaking even if you hide the Dashboard. To stop listening to the news, press the Pause button.

Preferences Explained

In the preferences pane (back side) you can specify the sources you want to get news from. The list of your Safari bookmarks of RSS feeds will be displayed. Check the boxes of the ones you want to use.

You can also specify the voice you want to use to read the header and text (summary) of the news. If you set the text voice to "--None--", only the headers will be read.

Finally, you can specify the time interval (in minutes) to automatically refresh the news. To manually refresh the news, click in the refresh button in the bottom-right corner of the front side.

Vocero will automatically look for new versions of the widget. If there is a newer one, a small notification will appear in the bottom part of the preferences pane. Click it to go to the widget's website and download the latest version.

Known Issues

Some RSS Sources

Here is a list of some of my favorite RSS sources. To use them in Vocero, open the one you want in Safari and add a bookmark to it.

You can find more sources at: CNET Editor's Fave Feeds, RSS Top 55 and Syndic8.

Contact

For comments and feedback, please write to Daniel Gobera vocerowidget@gmail.com

Special thanks to:

Mexico Channel
Lorena Bustamante
Mauricio Gobera

Version History

Version 1.2 - Oct/5/2005

Version 1.1 - Sep/5/2005

Version 1.0 - Sep/2/2005