I found a new RSS reader called “Times”, available for the Mac. It’s interesting because it takes your RSS feeds and lets you lay them out in a “newspaper” that you can easily read through. Here’s a quick glimpse:
The interface
You can set up a number of different “Pages” (1) just as you’d have in a newspaper. Each page contains a number of different RSS feeds that you can drag into any of the three different areas of the page (2) or (3). Clicking on a story link will open that story right in Times (although you can configure it to use your web browser instead, if you prefer).
Stories
It does this neat “slide” animation when opening up stories. You can optionally configure a page curl animation, which is really neat looking, but too painful on my Macbook with a crappy GPU. To return to the main page, you simply click on it at the bottom of the screen (1).
The shelf
The other cool feature worth mentioning is “the shelf” which is kind of a bookmarks setup. You can drag articles to the shelf to save them for later reading.
In conclusion
All in all, Times is a neat idea. The biggest pain for me was that it’s hard to tell what’s a new article, what’s been read, as well as identifying each of your feeds (there is a title and a favicon at the top of each section, but it’s a little too subtle). I think it would have been really nice if there were a few customization options built in so that you could adjust typography, make unread stories bold, that sort of thing.
Times has a bit of an uphill battle. They’re asking $30 for the application, in a land where there are all kinds of excellent RSS readers available for free (NetNewsWire, NewsFire). Acrylic Software has taken a unique approach though, and with a little extra work, should have a really solid product on their hands.
You can grab yourself the 14 day trial here: http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/
