Times RSS Reader Review
Acrylic’s Times RSS Reader has garnered a lot of buzz lately. It’s ostensibly every other RSS app you’ve ever used, but the twist is that it will position your feeds into various blocks and columns like a newspaper grid, giving you an assortment of stories to read. It uses pagination to separate content into different categories.
I currently subscribe to 30+ RSS Feeds, of which I read around 10-15 compulsively. I use Netvibes for this because it has a lot of great advantages over software-based RSS readers (the telemobility notwithstanding). The major disadvantage is, of course, that I’m unable to passively follow a feed: I have to actively go to Netvibes to check and see if it’s been updated. That’s fine for sites like Lifehacker and Linkbunnies, which are usually either nonessential or infrequently updated, but there are certain sites that pique my interest with a vast majority of their content, so to have a gentle prod when they have updated would be a great benefit.
Times seemed like a natural place to start, but there are a lot of crippling problems. A lot of people gripe about the price - $30 for something you can do for free with Netvibes, Google Pages, NetNewsWire, et al - but that isn’t something that bothers me. If you build a product I like, I’ll pay for it. The main issue I had with Times was the interface for adding feeds. For something that has presumably been through several stages of testing (it’s a 1.0.4 app at the moment) it seemed unpolished and ill-considered.
You select your feeds for each page from a library of sources that is pre-populated by Acrylic’s choice of sources. You drag them and drop them onto the placeholders on the grid. The interface for viewing your library is a lot like Mac OS X’s Dashboard, but hideously wrong - the buttons feel a little pokey and it looks very cluttered, which brings me nicely onto my main gripe: you can’t delete their choice of news feed - you’re stuck filtering through their library in search of the feeds you added. The library comes with about 15 feeds in it already - none of which I was remotely interested in reading.
It’d be helpful if Netvibes supported OPML exporting of feeds, but sorting through the 30+ feeds I read in Times’ cluttered interface would have been hellish. Hitting the tiny arrow buttons to skip to the next page… dragging the little buttons. It’s very sexy and ‘Apple’ in presentation but it’s a Microsoft solution in thought and planning.
Looks like my search for an RSS Reader goes on, sadly.