NEW RSS READER TIMES DISAPPOINTS

So I’m reading my RSS feeds as usual, and I see a whole bunch of posts about a new RSS reader, Times, that is “perfect” or “revolutionary”. So I think, geez, that sounds like something I’d be into. So I went to the Acrylic Software site to see what all the fuss was about. I saw the screenshots and they looked pretty nice. Times requires Mac OS X Leopard and it utilizes a lot of the core animation that is built into Leopard. Sounds good so far.

I go ahead and download the trial version and install it, export my OPML file from NewsFire (my RSS reader of choice), and try to get Times set up. What a nightmare. First of all, it comes preloaded with a ton of feeds that I couldn’t care less about. I really don’t care what Britney Spears is up to these days. Not only did they inundate me with feeds I don’t care about, there wasn’t a mass delete functionality that I could find. I had to click on each unwanted feed and then open up another menu to select delete. I couldn’t even right click to get a contextual menu.

So I decided to just give it a try, try to lay out my “page” the way that I would want it… and that was easy enough. It was cool to see thumbnails of images from the story on the “page”. But one thing that really stuck out to me was the overwhelming newspaper feel of the application. In the marketing copy they talk about how most RSS readers handle feeds like email (that being a bad thing), but Times handles RSS feeds like a newspaper. Seems to me that that reference is even farther from what feeds can be and often are. Maybe my feeds are different from everyone elses? I definitely do have the news in some of my feeds but more often it’s smaller pieces of content pushed to me in a feed. All that to say, the visual and interface device lacks.

I haven’t even gotten to the most annoying part of Times. It crashes all the time. So much so, I had to abandon even getting my feeds set up. And then, because it crashed, it didn’t remember that I deleted a number of feeds, so I had to do it all over again.

In the end it was too frustrating. I know it’s early for the piece of software, but I’ll wait for version 2 to give it another try.