I've specially designed the news browser in activeRenderer 2.0 so that I could scan through as many news items as possible without spending to much time over it, reading only the pieces that catch my interest.

Update: check out Jon Udell's new piece on Heads, decks, and leads, one of my favorite memes.

When clicking the icon at the left of 'Latest News' in the selector on the left side [screenshot], I get an outlined view of Radio's news aggregator: each batch of news acquired by the aggregator is grouped under one heading, displaying its date and time [screenshot], and only the latest (most likely unread) heading is shown expanded, listing all the sources with new items found during the run.

Thanks to the preview mode [screenshot], I don't need to expand news feed headings, I just hover the mouse cursor over the feed's wedge to get a list of the stories in it. The news browser actually creates titles for RSS feeds published with descriptions only (a very regretable habit...)

Whenever I find an interesting bit, I expand the feed's heading, then the title's heading to get the complete story. Clicking the wedge opens the full HTML version in another browser window for abbreviated feeds.

The news browser has one side effect though: since I'm a lot more efficient at reading RSS feeds, I've increased the number of feeds I subscribe to by a fair margin. Not such a great time gain after all :-)

If you don't see the Browser option in the top menu of your Radio desktop web pages after you've installed activeRenderer, or if the News tab of the browser does not show the 'Latest News' item, check activeRenderer's preferences page.