Amphetadesk is a news reader and aggregation program which is available for download in Windows, Mac or Linux. It sits quietly in your system tray as a fuscia/cyan-colored pill that you can right click on. In the background it will load various weblogs and/or news generated from RSS files that you define. This will allow users to see the headlines and perhaps read some of the text from their favorite weblogs. This review is based upon version 0.93.1 which was last updated (best as I can tell) Oct 31, 2002.

Out of the box Amphetadesk doesn’t come with comment functionality but you can add it by editing the AmphetaDesk/templates/ default/index.html template. Part of the fun of reading weblogs is seeing what comments others have regarding them, so it’s nice to see the ability to add comments. Trackback functionality, however, doesn’t seem to be an option at this time without hacking.

While I was typing this entry (the very first time) I stopped to refresh the channels list and it loaded into this same javascript window (which has no navigation bars, doh!) so I couldn’t go back and lost everything I had typed I bet if I had been able to go back, however, that the IE cache would have been destroyed and everything I typed would have been lost. I looked through the built-in settings and I didn’t see a built-in way to force Amphetadesk to always launch the results in a new target window, but there might be an easy way if you hack it. So a word to the wise: don’t refresh the channels while you are typing your blog entries into a javascript window with no navigation menu.

Support-wise, well, it’s free software so there really isn’t any (I don’t expect any support for free software). You can join a mailing list to find out about hacks and new announcements but I don’t know about anybody else but I’m not too down with mailing lists any more. They do have an RSS feed which is loaded by default when you first run the program.

There are other news reader / RSS aggregation programs that you can try, but for Amphetadesk’s ease of use, simplistic but useful features, and price (free, donationware; you can optionally donate to the author if you like) it’s well worth downloading and trying. Grade: B-

• Capturing info in a textarea box and copying to clipboard
• Can’t access CD or DVD data?
• How to access MySQL from Windows Command Prompt
• Review: A bit clumsy and awkward hovering with Cooliris
• B11: Freeware Webcam software
• List of software sins