I know… I know… A desktop ticker is not really a new idea and the BBC has had one for quite some time but most of the desktop news tickers out there are Windows-based.

The BBC’s John O’Donovan explains:

Firstly, they only work on Windows and are built out of a variety of proprietary tools. We’d like these to work cross-platform but we need to build them differently to do so. They are also difficult to manage and expensive to maintain. We considered a few approaches, but decided to grow our new widget out of Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR. This is firstly because these tools met our requirements to work cross-platform and deliver the desktop experience we wanted, and also because they linked up with in-house skills in the team which manages them, making them simpler to manage.

Today, the BBC launched their first AIR-based desktop ticker that keeps you up to date on the latest news and sports news. You can completely customize which types of news articles you are interested in and it also caches the latest news so you can still catch up on today’s news when you’re offline. You can have it running as a small application or minimize it as a ticker.

I’d love to see some video in there as well but hey… it’s still an early beta and I’m sure video is on their radar. Being a beta application, I have to point out that there are still some bugs in the application but that’s exactly what public betas are for, so you can give feedback…

More info and download on the BBC Internet Blog.
Via PaidContent.co.uk