MacTicker Reviewed
© 2000 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, March/April 2000,
pp. 35-37, reprint
information
Ticker tape is inexorably tied to images of wealth in the
United States. Old pre-Depression movies showed smug
industry giants examining ticker tape as it emerged from
glass-domed devices. Post-Depression movies showed anguished
industry giants examining less satisfactory tapes. Ticker
tape parades are granted to war heroes, astronauts, and
victorious sports teams. Electronic ticker tapes, created
with tens of thousands of lights, are a virtual hallmark of
New York City, appearing on buildings in Times Square and at
Times Square wannabes scattered around the city.
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MacTicker's main display is the ticker itself: a
banner running across the screen at a
user-selectable position and speed. Depending on
the size of the screen and what else you might be
doing, this can be a huge distraction or, on a
large screen, a very subtle reminder that there is
life out there, beyond your monitor. It is also a
great way to impress your coworkers, even if you
don't own a dime of stock. Comments such as "Wow!
It looks like a bad day for margin buyers in
postindustrial extractive mutuals" will impress
almost anyone, as long as they don't ask you what
that is supposed to mean.
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All that and more can be yours with MacTicker, an
electronic ticker tape from Aladdin Systems, best known for
their Stuffit compression package. MacTicker
doesn't provide wealth and celebrity, of course, but you can
use it without the expense of replacing all those light
bulbs in the moving billboards, or constantly recycling
miles of paper tape.
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If you see something of interest on the
streaming banner, double-clicking on the item will
bring up an information box about that stock. These
can be set to one of two sizes: a small, stark box
(such as Motorola's), with the bare minimum of
information, or a larger box (such as Apple's) with
a wider range of detail. Note the three icons in
the lower-right corner of the Apple box. Clicking
on the rightmost one will immediately refresh the
information displayed, if possible. Clicking on the
middle box allows you to configure how information
is displayed. Clicking on the leftmost box will
launch your browser and take you to a Web page
listing much more detailed information about the
selected stock.
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MacTicker is a small program that allows an
Internet-connected Macintosh to reach out and grab slightly
delayed stock market information. This information can be
displayed in a number of user-customizable ways, the most
useful being a scrolling electronic ticker at the top or
bottom of the screen. Color coding (using user-definable
colors) allows you to tell at a glance if things are going
well or badly on Wall Street.
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A preference window allows you to specify what
stocks MacTicker will track, and what symbol will
be used for those stocks. Aladdin Systems provides
a number of stocks as defaults (note the heavy
technology slant), and thoughtfully provides their
own lightly-traded stock as one of the options.
Adding stocks is quite easy, and the Lookup option
assists in looking up stock information on select
Web sites.
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You can add or delete stocks quite easily, attending only
to those stocks of personal interest. Alerts can be set to
trigger if the stock changes by a user-specified amount. If
you want more information about a stock, just double-click
on the symbol as it scrolls by and a box with more details
pops up. From here, you can even launch a Web browser and go
directly to a Web page filled with almost everything you
could want to know about that stock, including recent wire
service postings.
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The advanced preferences allow you to set such
items as proxy authorization (for firewalls, not
corporate boardroom battles), as well as specify a
site for on-line trading.
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Installation is a breeze. MacTicker can be
purchased and downloaded directly from Aladdin Systems' Web
site, in a purely electronic transaction. Or (for more
money) they can mail you a CD-ROM (which also includes demo
versions of Aladdin's other programs). Aside from defining
your own personal preferences, there is almost nothing you
need to do to get MacTicker going -- provided you
have an active Internet connection.
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MacTickler can be set to alert you to drastic
changes in stock price, with the definition of
"drastic," the color of the alert, and any special
formatting (blinking, bold, underline, italic) all
under user control.
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Running on a blue-and-white Power Macintosh G3,
MacTicker is unobtrusive. Tucked down on the bottom
edge of a 17-inch monitor, it was out of sight and out of
mind. The 2.8 megabytes of memory it uses by default were
not missed (this particular machine had 192 megabytes of
RAM). No measurements were taken to see if it slowed the
performance of the machine, mostly because it didn't
interfere with anything at all so: why bother? These results
would differ, of course, on a slower machine with less
memory and, in particular, a smaller monitor.
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There are many different options for determining
how MacTicker displays on the screen. As it ships,
MacTicker comes with a thoughtfully-selected series
of defaults, but if you really do want it to stream
across the top of your screen at breakneck screen,
directly on top of anything else you are doing,
displayed in garnish neon colors, yes, you can do
that.
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MacTicker, like several other recent Aladdin
products, will notify you of updates as they are available.
On the plus side, it always asks if you want to update,
rather than going out and updating itself without your
consent. On the minus side, the only update attempted during
the period of review (updating from MacTicker 1.6 to
1.6.2) resulted in a machine lockup: after agreeing to
download the update, MacTicker launched the browser,
the browser went to Aladdin's update page, and promptly
froze the machine. This exercise was repeated a couple times
until eventually downloading the update "manually" by simply
launching the browser (without MacTicker's aid) and
grabbing the update.
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MacTicker does not, of course, create the
information it displays. Instead, it goes out and
periodically sucks the information off well-known
Web sites. You can specify where it goes for this
information. Keep in mind, however, that all stock
Web site postings are deliberately delayed, so
information displayed on your screen will always be
15 minutes or more out of date.
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MacTicker's only real constraint is, of course,
the need for an active Internet connection. While it does
work just fine over a dial-up account, it works best, of
course, over a full-time Internet connection. Naturally, it
is also much more interesting when the stock market is
actually open; on weekends and holidays, MacTicker
doesn't do much.
Even if you are not a hard-core speculator,
MacTicker is worth the money simply for its
entertainment value. You can, for example, use it as a news
source: track a couple dozen interesting stocks, wait for
some interesting changes in their value, and then, with a
few clicks, you can be at a Web page, discovering that the
company in question won or lost a lawsuit, was purchased or
is purchasing someone else, or their latest product is a
success or a disaster.
As far as electronic toys go, MacTicker is a
winner.
MacTicker, $29.95
Requirements: Power Macintosh,
4 MB of RAM (for MacTicker),
Internet connection
Aladdin Systems
165 Westridge Dr.
Watsonville, CA 95076
(831) 761-6200
http://www.aladdinsys.com
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