The Pond

Intro

This is just a short review of the RSS reader, Times. It came as part of the MacHeist bundle this year, which I enthusiastically purchased, and now have a pile of apps to sort through.

User Interface

The user interface of Times is the big draw. Basically it presents what appears to be a newspaper like layout based on defined RSS feeds. The overall effect of this is pretty pleasing. It is actually a nice alternative to the list-of-links that most RSS readers provide.

That being said, a little more capability to configure the application to look the way you want would be nice. A few more themes would really move this from a reformat of an RSS reader to something different. My suggestion in this area would be to mimic the layout of various newspapers. Themes that laid out the page like the wall st journal, the NYT, or perhaps some other papers would be a welcome and fun feature for the UI.

As it now stands, neither the background color nor the font are configurable which isn’t a huge problem, but the main UI can look a lot like a Google News page.

Functionality

Times focuses largely on adding additional ‘pages’ with different feeds on them. This functionality works pretty well, though determining exactly where a new feed will end up when dragged to the main window is somewhat difficult.

Times can also post to Twitter, Digg, Facebook and Delicious, as well as any other page that can accept data about the current article. Configuration of these options is stellar, and the full custom URL building is very well done.

The “Shelf” in Times is much like clippings in NetNewsWire — a place to store articles to come back to later. The UI is great, and has adorable animations to go with it. It would likely get unwieldy to keep a large number of documents on the shelf — the shelf accommodates four “piles” of stuff which perform stack-like popup animations on mouse over.

For the non-RSS junkie, Times is an approachable and pretty aggregator, though it does need some additional touches for RSS neophytes.
To really bean aggregator for them, it might need a little more prompting or wizard-ish help to get users started; for example, the ‘edit’ and ’shelf’ buttons aren’t entirely clear, the ‘Page’ menu lacks a ‘new page’ function (this is instead on the ‘file’ menu), and the UI could use additional clarity in the areas of adding feeds to the page, and managing the shelf area.

Performance

This is the area that makes Times largely unsuitable for me. I subscribe to hundreds of feeds, which NetNewsWire dutifully updates on my MBP in < 1 minute. Times, however, can’t seem to handle this many feeds. I attempted to import the OPML from NNW’s feed list, only to have Times crash or hang every time. Simply put, Times can’t handle a huge list of feeds.

Overall

Despite the manual configuration (specifying feeds instead of importing a gigantic list of feeds), Times is quite pleasant to use once configured.

Times is great for a leisurely poke around sites you might have some interest in. For blasting through tons of news, it simply isn’t the right tool. It is, however, an RSS aggregator that my mother or brother might use and enjoy.