Inspired by the tickers of 24-hour cable news, Tickershock is an RSS, RDF and Atom news reader that displays news feeds anywhere on your desktop in a animated crawl or billboard display.

Tickershock is a departure from typical RSS applications that emulate traditional web browser or email reader environments. Focusing on the "push" nature of the technology, Tickershock aims to be a passive experience – but only until you decide a headline is worth exploring: a double-click on a news headline brings up a "News Inspector" (or your default browser) from which you can explore a story in greater depth.

And since it's optimized for performance, Tickershock requires a fraction of the CPU time used by more conventional stock and news tickers, freeing you to work but keep an eye on the news all the time.