Realtime News - Hot News

The Hot News tab is used to capture important news and generate alerts based on your search criteria.

When you first select the Hot News tab, it will be blank. Right-click the grid and select "Alert Definitions" to add a new custom alert

The Alert Settings dialog will pop up, but it is empty since you have not yet defined any alerts. Right-click the grid and select "Add new Alert" to create a new alert.

Now we have a blank alert that has been added and is ready to be customized:

You will be able to add or change the following alert settings:

Enable – check this box to enable the alert, uncheck it to disable the alert. Disable alerts instead of removing them if you may wish to use the alert in the future
Title – a title for the alert
Expression – the search expression that will filter matching incoming news to the Hot News tab, see below for more.
Color – the color of the Hot News text for this alert. Each alert you create can have the same or a unique color assigned to it.
Days – the number of days back to search for news matching your Expression setting
Max – the maximum number of news stories to return which match your defined criteria in the Expression setting
Sound – the sound file to play when news is received matching your Expression setting

Search Expressions Your expression can be made up of stock symbols or phrases and capitalization does not matter. A sphrase must be encapsulated by double quotes, while a stock symbol doesn't need to be. If you wish to search for multiple strings or symbols, you may do so using the "AND" and "OR" words, e.g. GOOG AND "picassa". You may also use "AND NOT" if you don't want to search for a word, e.g. "yankee" AND NOT "baseball"

Here are a couple examples of completed alerts

If you want to clear the sound you have selected for your alert, right-click the Sound column for your alert and select "No Sound" from the popup:

If you wish to delete an alert, simply right-click on it and select "Remove Alert". Again, disable alerts instead of removing them if you may wish to use the alert in the future.

Once you click "Okay" your alerts will be submitted to the news server and the matching news stories will be added to the Hot News grid.

Once you have valid alerts defined, you may wish to temporarily hide some alerts (especially if they are getting a lot of results) so that you can concentrate on the other alerts. If you right-click on the Hot News grid you will see some new options. "Show All" and "Hide All" show and hide all alert results, respectively. For each alert you have enabled you will see an entry in the menu. If the menu item is checked, the results from that alert are visible. If the menu item is unchecked, all results from that alert will be hidden. News stories from hidden alerts will still arrive and their sound will play (if they have one), but they won't be visible in the Hot News grid until you set their alert to visible.