What’s new in FeedsBar

Your own feeds, and your own symbols.

Settings, Sources, RSS now opens with Your Feeds. Paste any RSS or Atom URL and it goes live on your ticker the moment it validates. It is fetched by this Mac, shown only here, and never sent to FeedsBar, so a niche blog or a private feed is yours alone. Up to 20 feeds, the 20 newest items from each, refreshed every 15 minutes. Suggest a Feed is unchanged: that is still how you ask FeedsBar to carry a feed for everyone. Settings, Markets gains Your Symbols. Add a stock or ETF and it is quoted through your own Finnhub key, the same way the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, Dow and gold ETFs already are. Add a coin and it comes from CoinGecko with no key at all. Up to 10, and they scroll on the Market Quotes strip after the house set.

Download FeedsBar 1.2.8

Market Quotes gets its own name.

The second ticker's Mix menu had two entries called Markets: the price lane, and a news category of the same name with Bloomberg, MarketWatch and friends. The price lane is now called Market Quotes, sits directly under Music Lane, and its strip label says so. The Markets news category is unchanged.

Fix for Markets with your own Finnhub key.

If you pasted a free Finnhub key into 1.2.5 and saw "key rejected", the key was fine. Finnhub's free plan does not include the spot gold feed, and FeedsBar took that one refusal as a bad key and dropped all four of your quotes. Now a symbol your plan does not cover greys out on its own, the rest stay live, and the status line names it. Gold now comes from the GLD gold ETF, which the free plan serves in real time, alongside the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 and Dow ETFs. The rejected message also says which field to paste: the API Key from your Finnhub dashboard, not the Secret.

Markets on the ticker.

Set the second ticker's mix to Markets (right-click the ticker, Second Ticker, Mix) and a quote crawl runs under your news: Bitcoin, Ethereum, EUR/USD, GBP/USD and crude oil, each with its price and move. Readings that update once a day, like the ECB's currency fix, say so on the strip rather than pretending to tick. Want stocks too? Bring your own key. Finnhub gives away a free personal key, and FeedsBar uses it to add the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 and Dow ETFs plus gold. Paste it in Settings, Preferences, Markets. It lives in your Keychain and is only ever sent to Finnhub, never to us. Crypto prices are powered by CoinGecko. Currency fixes come from the European Central Bank. Oil comes from the FRED API, which is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

FeedsBar as your screensaver, and a second ticker.

Leave your Mac alone and the full-screen board can take over: big, slow-changing story cards on every display, readable from across the room. It closes the moment you touch a key or the trackpad, and your focus stays where you left it. Off by default. Turn it on in Settings, Preferences, Full Screen, "Open when idle", and pick 2, 5, 10 or 15 minutes. It does not lock your screen, so set the macOS screensaver to start later than this. The second ticker is now a proper feature. Switch it on in Preferences (or right-click the ticker) and a second strip runs under the first, scrolling the other way, with its own mix, speed, size and background. Two strips maximum, by design. Also in this release: a feed refresh no longer yanks the ticker while your pointer is resting on it, and collapsing to Mini Mode now shrinks the window properly when the second ticker is on.

Real colours, and a better-behaved music lane.

The ticker's backgrounds are now colours you can name: Black, Red, Blue, Green, Purple and Teal, each dark enough that headlines and album art stay out front. Right-click the ticker and pick one; the board follows. The music controls grew up too. Tune to Music is now the master switch, with Blend and Listen to the Room under it; toggles apply instantly from anywhere, and switching Tune to Music back on re-tunes to the song already playing instead of waiting for the next track. Album art now keeps pace when you skip, and stories in the artist stream carry their pictures.

Pick your ticker's colour.

Right-click the ticker and choose a Background: Black, Ink, Midnight, Forest, Plum or Espresso — six dark grounds that keep the headlines and artwork out front. The strip, the brand block and the full-screen board all follow your choice instantly. And the board now knows your music: while a song plays, the board's orb tile becomes the album — art, track and artist — so a screen full of one artist's stories explains itself.

Blend your music with your feeds.

The music lane gets a second mode: instead of taking the ticker over while a song plays, it can weave artist news, videos and posts in between your own feeds — one music item for every two of yours. Right-click the ticker and switch on "Blend Music with My Feeds". Off by default; the original tune-in behaviour is unchanged. Also in this release: the ticker's feed catalogue keeps working even when the server introduces source types this build has never heard of.

FeedsBar now follows your music.

Play something in Spotify or Apple Music and the ticker re-tunes to that artist — news, interviews, videos, similar artists and what the music press is saying, blended into your feeds. Skip a track to tune in; the lane remembers your last three artists, so a returning song picks up instantly. Prefer it off? Untick "Tune to Music" in the ticker's right-click menu. There's also "Listen to the Room" — off until you turn it on — which identifies whatever is playing around you using the microphone. Matching happens on-device; the audio itself never leaves your Mac.

Headlines no longer run off the edge of a card.

On the full-screen board, a story with no picture draws its source name large in the background. When that name was long it was pushing the card's own text off to the left, so a headline could lose its first word and the source line could lose the first few. Everything now sits where it belongs, and the big background lettering still runs to the edges the way it was meant to. Two stories from the same source no longer sit on the board at the same time.

The Settings window now opens at a sensible size — and stays where you put it.

It used to open too small to show a whole panel, so you had to resize it every time, and it forgot the size as soon as you closed it. It now sizes itself to your display, remembers whatever size and position you choose, and cannot be shrunk small enough to hide its own tabs. The sidebar is tidier too — the app name no longer appears twice on the same screen.

Settings tidy-up.

The FeedsBar mark now appears where a placeholder icon used to be — in the sidebar and on the About screen — and the sidebar says FEEDSBAR rather than a clipped "FEEDS". The Settings window also has a minimum size now. It could previously be dragged small enough that the tabs disappeared behind the title bar, leaving no way to switch tabs without resizing blind.

Hovering a card on the full-screen board now works properly.

Holding a card no longer stops the whole board — the other tiles keep turning while the one you are reading stays put. And the pause marker no longer sticks on a card you have moved away from, which made it look as though the board had frozen.

A better look for stories without a picture.

The source name now sits in the empty band between the meta line and the headline, and moves around that space — so some cards show the whole name and others a large crop, rather than every one looking identical. It no longer crosses the headline. Also: fewer blank thumbnails. Some publishers give us image links over plain http, which macOS refuses to load, so those stories showed an empty box. They are now fetched securely and appear.

Two fixes from yesterday's build.

On the full-screen board, stories without a picture had the source name printed straight through the headline. It now sits above the headline, out of its way. Updating now quits the app first. Before, the download started while FeedsBar kept running, so dragging the new copy into Applications meant installing over a running app — which macOS either refuses or does badly. It asks first, so you can finish reading.

Full screen: stories without a picture now look like they belong.

Some stories can never have a picture. Ask HN posts have no article behind them, Reddit links point at comment threads, and a few publishers block us from fetching one. Those cards used to be a flat gap in a wall of photos. Now they are set as type: the story's topic colour behind it, and the source's name large and cropped behind the headline. It reads as a choice rather than a missing image. Also: more stories have real pictures than before. A background job that fills them in had been re-checking the same handful over and over instead of working through the list.

Fixes headlines that did nothing when you clicked them.

About one story in fifty could not be opened at all — no error, no flicker, nothing happened. It hit sports hardest: CBS Sports, Deadspin and Sportsnet were the worst affected, so if you read those, a fair share of your clicks went nowhere. The cause was invisible whitespace around the link. Those stories are already in your ticker, and they start working the moment you update. Also in this build: Launch at login has moved to the Startup section in Settings, and board images sit better behind the headlines.

Fixes clicking a headline opening the wrong article.

If you paused the ticker and clicked a story, FeedsBar could open a different one — reliably the same wrong story, because the strip was being drawn in one place and clicked in another. This affected every build since the ticker started scrolling, so if you have ever clicked a headline and got something unrelated, it was this and not you. Worth updating.

Fixes curated sets.

Switching off your last curated set turned on every source in the library — more than 900 of them, against a ceiling of 100 — so the ticker ended up pulling an arbitrary hundred and showing a "capped at 100" warning. With no set selected you now get the hundred strongest sources instead. Picking a set works exactly as before.

Fixes the Settings window.

With the new topic orbs, the row of orbs ran off the right-hand edge and dragged the source board out of view with it, so Settings looked cut off. The orbs now wrap to fit whatever width the window is. If your Settings looked clipped on the right, this is the fix. Nothing else has changed.

The signal orbs now follow the same thirteen topics as the source library.

Six topics that had no orb before — Culture & Arts, Style & Beauty, Home & Living, Food & Travel, Health & Wellbeing and Ideas & Longform — now have one. The existing orbs also read from the whole library instead of a small slice of it. Sports and Breaking News were seeing almost none of the sources they cover, so their mood and momentum should look a lot more alive.

Fixes the app never starting after you activate it on a fresh install — the loading screen would cycle forever with no ticker and no settings. Anyone affected should install this build; no need to re-enter your key.

Settings Home no longer buries itself. The source board is capped at twelve rows so the header, orbs and Minimize button stay on screen, and the count is now labelled "sources" — it counts publishers, not feeds.

Fixes flickering icons.

With the source library now over 800 feeds, source icons and article thumbnails could drop out of memory and reload while you scrolled, which looked like flickering. Both caches now hold the whole library. Also in recent releases: - Twelve curated bundles, served from the server, so new sources appear without waiting for an app update. - Picking more than one bundle shares the ticker between them and takes the best sources from each. - Watch up to 100 feeds at once, up from 50.

Many more sources, and better bundles.

- The source library has grown from about 170 feeds to over 800, curated and scored, across twelve subject bundles. - Bundles now come from the server, so new sources appear without waiting for an app update. - Picking more than one bundle now shares the ticker between them and takes the best sources from each, instead of filling up on the first one. - You can watch up to 100 feeds at once, up from 50.

FeedsBar is now just FeedsBar.

The app used to install as FeedsBarClient, an internal name that showed up in your Applications folder and in Login Items. ONE THING TO DO if you are coming from 1.0.x: this installs as a new app alongside the old one. Drag the old FeedsBarClient to the Bin, and enter your licence key once more. Your key has not changed. Also in this release: - On a second display, the ticker now opens on the screen you activated on rather than wherever the mouse happened to be. - The licence key box is actually visible, and every text field in the app reads better on a dark background. - The menu bar icon is always there, so you can reach or quit FeedsBar even before a key is entered. - Saving a weather city updates the ticker straight away. - Licences cover 5 Macs, and are re-checked once a day. If the check cannot reach us, nothing changes and the app keeps working.

FeedsBar is now just FeedsBar.

The app used to install as FeedsBarClient, an internal name that showed up in your Applications folder and in Login Items. It is FeedsBar everywhere now. ONE THING TO DO: this installs as a new app alongside the old one. Drag the old FeedsBarClient to the Bin, and enter your licence key once more. Your key has not changed. Also in this release: - The menu bar icon is always there, so you can reach or quit FeedsBar even before a key is entered. - Saving a weather city updates the ticker straight away. - The loading screen shows the FeedsBar mark. - Licences cover 5 Macs, and are re-checked once a day. If the check cannot reach us, nothing changes and the app keeps working.

Fixes.

- The menu bar icon is always there now, so you can always reach or quit FeedsBar even before a key is entered. - Saving a weather city updates the ticker straight away. - The loading screen shows the FeedsBar mark. - If a licence is retired you can enter a different one without emailing us, and that screen is sized properly. - FeedsBar re-checks your licence once a day. If the check cannot reach us, nothing changes and the app keeps working. - Licences cover 5 Macs.

Fixes.

- Saving a weather city now updates the ticker straight away instead of waiting for the next refresh. - The loading screen shows the FeedsBar mark. - If a licence is retired, you can enter a different one without emailing us first, and that screen is sized properly. - FeedsBar re-checks your licence once a day. If the check cannot reach us, nothing changes and the app keeps working. - Licences cover 5 Macs.

Licence handling.

- If a licence is retired, you can now enter a different one without having to email us first. - FeedsBar re-checks your licence once a day. If the check cannot reach us, nothing changes and the app keeps working. - Licences cover 5 Macs.

Licence handling.

- FeedsBar now re-checks your licence once a day. If the check cannot reach us, nothing changes and the app keeps working. - A refunded licence is retired properly instead of lingering. - Licences cover 5 Macs.

First public release.

- A menu bar item, so Settings and Quit are always reachable, even while the ticker is hidden for an app you have excluded. - FeedsBar now starts at login by default. Turn it off in Settings. - Live weather in the ticker, replacing a placeholder. - The activation screen opens as a proper window instead of a clipped strip. - The FeedsBar mark now appears on the ambient board.