Filed under: Software, Cool tools
Getting started with Times, an RSS reader for everyone
Most RSS readers on the desktop look like lists. Times, a reader Mat covered last year, looks like a newspaper. In a "normal" RSS reader, the river of information can become a blur and users may be put off by the incessant noise. Times, on the other hand, aims to make feeds more pleasant to peruse. Check out the gallery to see the curled edges, slight texturing on the sides of the "paper" and page effects. It's the app I'd get my grandmother to use to read RSS feeds, and I think it's a great introduction to feed reading for "the rest of us." Here's how to get started.When you click on a story's headline or body text, the page folds down, and you read. When you're done, you click the folded page and it pops back up to reveal the feeds again. Added to this basic "graze and read" functionality seen on all RSS readers is the shelf (something many readers have as well, like the clippings in NetNewsWire), a place to temporarily hold stories you are interested in. You can read these later and then throw them out. Times isn't intended to be a storage locker or book reader -- it is designed for quick scanning and reading. Likewise, the shelf is only so large and can be set to automatically clear itself at certain intervals.
The first thing you'll want to do with Times is customize the feeds. Especially if you are setting this up for someone else (like grandma), you can easily remove the pre-configured feeds and add your own. I recommend not adding dozens of feeds to Times. While power users may scan hundreds of sites, the average person may only make time for a few. NetNewsWire and other readers are better equipped to serve the sort of information overload of a "power reader" and I've included a shot of Feeds and NetNewsWire for comparison in the gallery. Times is designed for some "light" feed reading and aims to make the process more pleasant, not powerful. I recommend no more than 6-8 per category page.
Next I'll show you exactly how to set up your own category pages and fill those in with feeds. Then I'll show how to use the shelf and sharing tools.
Gallery: Times RSS reader
From the File menu, click "New Page" and your new page will appear. Give it a title and note the blank page. The default layout is a 3-box grid, but you can drag the lines around and even drag them into the borders of the window (where they will disappear). Those boxes are where your feeds will go, of course. You can drag pages by their favicon into the boxes on the page. Times is smart enough to recognize when a page has multiple feeds -- usually Atom or XML, but usually you'll just need to select the top feed.
You can also add feeds by clicking the little pencil in the top right corner. A drawer full of feeds in use appears. Times comes with a variety of feeds built-in, but you can simply drag and drop your own just as you did on the page. That's about it! If you stick with the default arrangement I find you can fit two or three feeds per box, depending on how much news you can absorb. You can fit more, technically, but since feeds tend to render bigger in Times, it's just easier not to scroll that much. Each feed offers a "show more" button so you can see earlier content beyond where you scroll.
The shelf is just that: a little wooden shelf where you store articles. Just click the little trapezoid next to the pencil and the shelf appears. Drag articles onto the shelf for later reading. You can stack articles as you go, but it isn't intended for really managing bookmarks. It's more of a way to skim the feeds and collect what you really want to read.
Once you set up Times, you might consider the sharing tools built into the app. There is a way to add accounts for Delicious, Facebook, Twitter and Digg. Once those are set, right-clicking on an article gives you instant access to sharing features. Nifty!
Check out the gallery to see Times in action. It's a beautiful app, and works like a charm. It's $30 from Acrylic and requires 10.5 or later.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Phosphor said 1:10PM on 4-14-2009
Tough titties to the glacial masses.
Available only for OS X 10.5.x.
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Jason P said 1:55PM on 4-14-2009
I thought most people were on 10.5 by now
amb@home said 1:25PM on 4-14-2009
i got time from the macheist bundle and am very happy with it so far
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amb@home said 1:26PM on 4-14-2009
*times not time :)
KarlW said 2:47PM on 4-14-2009
I had tried Times ages ago and was pleasantly surprised to have it in the MH bundle.
Times is a fantastic idea, but falls down in practice. Here's a few reasons why:
- Too many articles changing too fast makes it hard to use every day
- Articles are often just summaries. It'd be nice if Times would know when this happens, say through analysing the length or a database of RSS services, and would pull back the original article and reformat it for you in the app window.
- It doesn't look like a newspaper. I'd like it to lay it out like a newspaper with pictures and headlines (which it would detect from analysing common words in multiple news feeds, perhaps with some type of social networking aspect for late-breaking news).
- I'd like larger fonts for on-screen reading, and a white-on-black mode.
Adding those would make Times the best feed reader out there IMO.
PK said 1:31PM on 4-14-2009
I picked up Times as part of MacHeist this year and really like it so far, with one caveat: refreshing the feeds takes a really long time. Whenever I start the app it takes a few minutes for it to stop beachballing and become responsive, and whenever it refreshes the feeds (every 10 minutes) it slows down dramatically again. It could just be one problematicfeed, but I do wish that the app could handle it better. Other than those periodic slowdowns Times is a great little program for keeping up with news you like...
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Kev orng said 1:32PM on 4-14-2009
I got Times with the Macheist bundle, and gave it a try for a week
I didn't dislike it, in fact I found it innovative and interesting, give or take a few bugs with importing and adding feeds to pages.
But when it came right down to it, as stated in this article, it's for someone who wants to keep up with 3 sources per category. So ideally your "news" section will be your 3 favourite news sources, your entertainment section is your three favourite entertainment sources, you can make a Blogs page with your three favourite blogs, and so on.
So having imported all of my feeds (with some difficulty) from NetNewsWire, my initial thought was, okay, fine my favourites are down here on the page looking awesome, now where are my notifications for all these other feeds in my source lists?
I never found the answer. After a couple days, i went back to NetNewsWire so I could see the list.
So yes, if you're a news hound or you have a lot of feeds, Times is not for you.
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WalrusCP said 1:36PM on 4-14-2009
Definitely not for "power" users, but for your average Joe or Jane this is a perfect RSS reader. Just simply a well-implemented GUI that looks really good and works. Will not be a very good option at this time for RSS junkies who follow dozens if not hundreds of feeds.
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Raul Riera said 1:39PM on 4-14-2009
Totally agree, that's what made me delete it sadly... Waiting on some feature that will allow me to view the RSS that are "scrolled down" or something... Sticking to Safari RSS for now
Romain said 1:41PM on 4-14-2009
I also got Times through the MacHeist bundle.
I'm happy with it, except for its "feed refresh" behavior. I have very few "new articles" marked in green as it should (just like in the screenshots you gave). In my Times, new articles mostly appear in black, and every once in a while, older articles come back to the black color, eventhough I've already marked them as read.
Anyone having the same problem? I'm sure it's not the way it was designed to work...
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Bret said 1:53PM on 4-14-2009
I got the Times via this year's Macheist, and while it looks great in appearance I'd much rather see some Google Reader integration in some fashion.
I use Google Reader exclusively on the desktop currently for managing my feeds and then Byline on the iPhone to tie into the same account. The concept is great, but only really suitable to somebody looking to start from scratch to create their news page views.
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pianomansam said 2:15PM on 4-14-2009
I also got Times with my MacHeist bundle. Tried it out for ten minutes. Was very disappointed in how slow and bloated it was. It wound up taking 500mb RAM. Way too much for an RSS reader, especially when there's fast alternatives such as NetNewsWire.
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jagreenwood said 3:08PM on 4-14-2009
Agreed. I gave it an honest try, but I doubt I go back to it. It is a total resource hog. When I was using the app, it took up 15-40% of the cpu and >130mb memory. It was chewing on the cpu even with it minimized.
I emailed their support on 4/8 and still haven't heard anything...
Don Perreault said 5:15PM on 4-14-2009
I also got Times with the MacHeist Bundle and was very happy to get it. But I also am experiencing the same problems with the addition of frequent crashes. I went back to NetNewsWire.
seoulchi1d said 2:31PM on 4-14-2009
overglorified rss reader, lacking major substance; no mobile companion, no syncing, and overpriced.
stick with netnewswire, it may not be sexy but you'll actually use it.
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Kurt said 3:16PM on 4-14-2009
I don't understand all the hate - I got Times with the MacHeist bundle and LOVE it. I'm not a power RSS reader, and maybe that's the difference - but it's a clean*, elegant interface that makes it easy to catch up on news.
* I really really dislike the way they've added cruft to the main window - it's designed to look like multiple stacked windows, but all it does is take up real estate - and it's buggy on multiple monitors (sometimes the "stacked" background image doesn't move to the second monitor). The page curling is something I disabled immediately in favor of the less-distracting slide.
Despite these issues, I'm pretty happy. Times, ShoveBox and The Hit List are the three apps I'm currently getting the most use out of from the latest MacHeist.
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Nikax said 6:22PM on 4-14-2009
Good review of Times. I too got it with the MH bundle and thought I'd give it a try, after a week I'm heading back to Vienna. Too slow to update feeds, and not for power users. I thought my wife, who is a RSS newbie, might like it, but no sale there either.
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James said 6:29PM on 4-14-2009
This was a great idea that simply can't deliver (no pun intended). As already stated above, if you have more than few feeds for each category it simply doesn't work. Too much mousing around, refreshing and scrolling.
You can get the exact same experience if your run Firefox by using the Feedly extension - which at least gives an option to just list the titles in each feed, as well as a few different layouts.
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Donald said 9:44PM on 4-15-2009
I tried Times, but the one thing that killed it was the lack of basic keyboard support, such as using the up/down and left/right arrows to skip through articles.
So, I went back to NetNewsWire (keyboard support, wide-screen view and syncing with other computers/iPhone are the key features for me)
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JSacharuk said 7:35PM on 4-18-2009
I just tried it out for a bit.
I couldn't find a fast way to go to the next article without going back to the main page. I use Newsfire, which I've gotten so used to that if other RSS readers can't do everything it can, they're turfed. This just isn't fast enough for me to browse through a few hundred articles find the interesting ones, and skip through the cruft.
It sure is pretty, though. I hope they do well; I like this sort of interesting interface experimentation.
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