The Wii News Channel dropped over the weekend and I’m impressed. It’s essentially a flashy RSS feed for the Associated Press with a few neat tricks that just might make it worthwhile even if I had a computer less than 10 feet away.
Like most feeds, you get your text and associated image. You can increase or decrease the size of the type with the “+” and “-” buttons on the Wii remote causing the words to fly back and forth as they scale to fit the available space. Clicking on an image brings it up full screen.
What’s really neat is the “Slide Show” function which slides the headlines across the screen accompanied by an exciting “breaking news” sort of tune. Pressing “A” brings up the full text of the story. You can also go into a “Globe” function that shows the stories with locations encoded on the same globe from the Forecast Channel. Nifty stuff, though it would have been nice to be able to tinker with the RSS source.
Embedded video below. This is my first attempt to record with the Neuros Recorder and I’m hoping the dropouts in the video are just due to not reading the manual, not setting and preferences, and/or hooking it up ad hoc to the rat’s nest that sits behind my teevee.
