Feed Reading with Times

1043 days ago in Articles, Contributors, Reviews by John Fuller | No Comments

RSS Readers are used to retrieve articles, or posts, from frequently visited sites using an RSS feed. This typically includes online newspapers and blogs. Yet, most RSS Readers are boring. That’s where Times comes in, designed to bring the newspaper experience to the desktop.

Times is heavily graphics-based, with a design that mimics a physical newspaper. Instead of arranging feeds in a folder hierarchy, Times allows you to drag and drop them into a unique arrangement. Feeds are organized by giving them a specific place on the “newspaper”, and can be categorized into various “pages”, or sections.

Instead of the default, one-liner displayed in most other feed readers, Times will retrieve the text of an article and display it after clicking the headline. Times also uses many page curls and slides as transitions to boost the experience.

Other features include the ability to share articles to Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Twitter, and any website of your choosing. There’s also a “shelf” for storing articles that you wish to view later. The shelf even supports ‘stacks’ for grouping posts together.

In many ways, Times is a fresh way of using a feed reader. In many ways, Times is the RSS reader that Apple would have concocted themselves. However, power users might find that all the flashy features obtrude on getting to the content quickly. It would have been nice if there was an included “list view”, that was reminiscent of NetNewsWire so that users could flip back and forth between views.

At $30 for a single-user license, Times isn’t terribly cheap, yet it is worth it for users wanting a simplified and beautiful RSS-reading experience. There’s also a free trial available for download from Acrylic.