3D RSS reader for Windows Vista!
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Microsoft has released a 3D RSS reader for Vista that uses the Windows Presentation Foundation to transform your RSS folders and feeds into a 3D galaxy! Your folders will be represented as galaxies, and your feeds will be represented as stars that are cubes and spin and or smaller or larger depending on how many items are unread! And the faces of the cubes will display the current content and media for the RSS feed! As a Star Trek fan, I find this very cool!!
And on top of that it’s made to be like a game. You can “fly” through your feeds like you’re in some space ship in all three dimensions. As you fly through, you can select an item from the feed and the cube will turn and display the content of that item. Right-clicking the mouse buttons brings you back out to the galaxy for more exploring!
Unfortunately, since a lot of feeds don’t have logos right now, the cubes will only show a generic feed icon, so if you really want to get the full visual appeal of the reader, you’ll have to find feeds that have logos.
Here are the requirements for the reader, named UniveRSS (a clever name also):
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum), Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel
UniveRSS is a showcase application that demonstrates the use of several WPF features, 3D animations, data binding, and data visualization.
And that’s not all, there is a whole list of features that will be added to the reader in the coming months:
- alternative ways to navigate in UniveRSS
- further customization features and RSS feed management information
- advanced search and sorting possibilities
- more-advanced physical animation model
- integration of Live services
- additional layouts
Source: http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/thepanel/featured/universs.aspx
» Filed Under Free Software Downloads
Related Posts
- RSS Bandit – Free desktop RSS reader
- How to use Google Reader to manage RSS feeds
- Subscribe to the RSS feed of a category, author or tag in WordPress
- Create 3D designs & models, 3D animations, 3D games using Blender
- FeedBlender – Combine multiple RSS feeds into one blended feed