For a while I have been annoyed that there is no good notification in Internet Explorer 7 when you have unread posts in your subscribed feeds. You have to have the Favorites Center opened to be notified of any feed updates, which may take up useful space on your screen.
Therefore I created a small utility that takes advantage of the Windows RSS platform and shows an icon in the system tray which notifies you of any unread feed posts - called msfeedicon.
Functionality:
- Uses the feed you have subscribed to using Internet Explorer 7
- Installs in the Startup folder so it starts when you log on to Windows
- Shows the number of unread items
- Baloon tip when a feed is updated and has new posts
- Checks for updates to the application
You can download the msfeedicon utility from here.
You need Microsoft.NET 2.0 or higher and Internet Explorer 7 to run this utility, and I have only tested it on Windows XP so far (Update an hour later - works on Vista).
If you have any suggestions or find anything that does not work, please post a comment to this post.