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.

Prompted by a TUAW reader comment on my post the other day about some Quicksilver fundamentals, I thought I would take a crack at posting some short tutorials on what Quicksilver actually does, and how to get started with it. I'm talking about the most basic of the basics here for anyone who is curious but still confused as to what the heck they're looking at the first time they launch Quicksilver. To anyone who can't make heads or tails of it: I don't blame you. It took me quite a while to wrap my head around all this stuff, so I hope I can do you some justice with this post.

Disclaimer - I use a somewhat modified version of Quicksilver and I've added a lot of extras, but for this demo I *think* I've properly fixed my copy to look like a default Quicksilver install.

Speaking of my screenshot - let's get started.