RSS Reader with a Natural Touch
Summary:
A RSS reader that looks like a proper newspaper.
There’s a new RSS reader that displays news similar to a newspaper: Times (from Acrylic). I’m eager to test it. Newsfire is great, but Times could be better.
So I’ve given Times a try - and I have to say: I’m very disappointed.
The only thing it manages to do is looking good. But in the most important thing for a RSS reader it fails completely: Times is not able to provide a quick overview over recent topics and news of various feeds.
From the look of the screenshots at Acrylic I had expected it to create a relevant order and an appealing newspaper look automatically. But obviously I expected too much.
Times displays all news feeds seperately and only in an order that you have to set manually.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the main article “Seeing Around: New ET essay published” from Ask E.T. doesn’t have an image. I expected Times to choose another recent article from another feed that has an image. But that’s just me expecting things to be great.
Furthermore the strictly manual layout that groups articles from one feed into one layout group limits the number of visible feeds in my layout to 4 (Ask E.T., Styleboost Links, A List Apart and Design Tagebuch). If I want to see recently published articles of my other design related feeds, I have to scroll down the page (the scrollbars only appear when your mouse is over a layout column).
If you put one feed into section 1, its articles will only appear there. And only the first article of that feed will be displayed in large letters, the other articles in tiny letters beside it.
Times offers no option to switch from displaying articles by feed to displaying articles by date or read status and it doesn’t hightlight new or unread articles - with the consequence that you have no chance of getting a quick overview over new or unread news.
What’s the use of Times then? I have no idea.