Big Screen Headlines 2

Nial has posted an update on Big Screen Headlines 2 an RSS reader for Vista Media Center. It is a great application for reading RSS feeds, listening to Podcast and watching videos. The blog post has some details of the new version and some nice screen shots, Nial will be on The Media Center Show in a few weeks to talk about his applications

A quick summary of (some) of the major enhancements include (see screenshots below for more examples) :

• Brand new UI system. Most notably – the new 4 way main menu (XBox360 dashboard style) allowing quicker access to content.
• Enhanced article display /parsing of HTML content - allowing for viewing articles as they were originally intended with new support for embedded images (where various images are contained within the article text.).
• Enhanced parsing of RSS Feeds and new extensions (ie RSS Media, Atom,  iTunes, iPhotos etc etc) – with display/extraction of things like thumbnails, comments, ratings etc.
• Enhanced viewing/filtering/sorting/grouping when viewing of Feeds/Lists of feeds – including several sort types, forward/reverse ordering – plus ability to alter text sizes (for low/high res screens) and change the view style (ie change how big items are and whether you just see headlines or they expand to reveal more information when highlighted).
• Support for dynamic OPML 2.0 includes – which means you can point to OPML files from inside the presets rather than hardcoded RSS URL’s. This feature works a treat for places like TheDigitalLifestyle.com who publish an OPML file (containing all the podcasts, blogs and video feeds they have) and regularly add (and remove) their available feeds. (so you don’t need to worry about managing each individual feed). You can also point to a local OPML file (which might be regularly updated from your rss reader on another machine).
• Direct access to latest Subscribed feed items (as a whole) from main menu (so you can see latest news items from main menu without viewing any feeds)
• View Comments feeds from News Items
• Lots of new preset feeds / opml links for better updating of available content.
• Quick and Easy Export Subscribed Feeds into an OPML file (so it can be used when in Extender mode).

Big Screen Blog: Work In Progress : Big Screen Headlines 2