Weblog of a “Switcher”

This is going to be a really unfortunate review. I had some high hopes for this reader. It has a gorgeous interface. Way better than any I have seen in any other feed reader. It’s not for all the feeds you would be reading since the format of the UI is a newspaper. But there was one nagging problem that made me remove the program from my Hard Drive.

It has certainly received high praise from many other bloggers. As well as a bunch of Twitter posts.

Times, by Acrylic software, is a really unique idea in RSS Feed readers.

The main User Interface is a newspaper. All the stories from many feeds are displayed on the front page of this newspaper and when there are more stories that can fit in one section, there will be a scroll bar that will allow you to scroll down to the rest of the stories.

When you find a story that you are interested in reading, you simply click on the story and the front page curls down to reveal the story on a full page behind the front page. If there is a picture in the story, you can click on a small eyeball icon to do a QuickLook on the picture to see a bigger version of the picture. Not the best way to do that. I would prefer just clicking anywhere on the picture. Still, a really nice touch.

It’s really pretty.

However, there is one nagging problem that really bothered me to the point that I removed it. Managing the subscriptions. The only way I could find to manage the subscriptions that Times uses a small slide down section of the interface that shows about 15 subscriptions that look like buttons. There are a couple of controls at the top of the section:

Here is the problem here. I wanted to remove all the subscriptions that come with the program. There is no way to multi-select the list of feeds currently subscribed to. So removing all the feeds at once was not an option. So, I had to select one at a time and hit the delete key for each and acknowledge the delete for each feed. I wasn’t happy about this, but I only had to do it once. However, as I was deleting the feeds, the program would crash. This happened several times. So I gave up on Times.

I suspect that when 2.0 comes out, Times will be a very cool program. I’ll certainly give them another chance when 2.0 comes out, but until then, I’m going to have to pass on it.

Good luck Acrylic, keep up the great work with such a unique interface. Something lacking in a lot of software and other forms of entertainment.

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written by Dave M. \\ tags: feed, newspaper, reader, rss, times