Times1.1.5

If you purchase an app, shouldn't is be ad free?

Application keeps on crashing... (ver 1.1.5) I need to " force quit" it and re open it almost every time I launch it. The interface is really good looking... hope for a more stable future version.

Great idea for a RSS reader. I love the interface. But the app is instable and eats a lot of memory in certain cases.

A well-presented RSS reader with a deal-breaking flaw. On the whole this app looks nice, is intuitive to use and offers sufficient features for basic RSS reading. However, the deal-breaker is this: it seems it will only download a maximum of 20 articles for any given feed. This, at any rate, has been my experience. The MacUpdate RSS feed amongst many others (eg. DealMac's "Today's Edition" feed) often has more articles than this for download-so what are you supposed to do? All you can do is go to the website and browse the rest (if there are any) there. Or use Mail.app, which is not ideal, IMHO. So, like I say, a deal-breaker. Hopefully the developer will fix this not minor flaw, and all-of-a-sudden he'll be close to having a top-notch RSS reader on his hands! All that would remain is a partner app for the iPhone/iPod touch and he'd be sailing…

User added feeds and pages are gone when app is updated. Only default set remains. Needs work.

If you use netnewswire, you already know why I have issues with this app.

If you purchase an app, shouldn't is be ad free?

Great looking and exactly what I want from a news aggregator... Now if only it would run for more than a few minutes without crashing. I DO have high hopes for this software, and look forward to its stable release.

I got this app through MacHeist3 and like it alot - especially the news-style-GUI! I think it has high potential on the RSS-reader market - but, the developer still has some work to do. The devleloper has to hunt down some more bugs (e.g. mark fresh articles doesn't work every time), that stop me from using the app every day. I don't use other RSS-readers because I don't like the GUIs they have. Besides the bugs, the app needs a few more features (show number of unread articles of active page, show number of all unread articles, mark all articles gray, ...) to make me really happy. But I think the developer gets tons of feature requests and bug reports this days (after MacHeist3) and I'm sure he will deliver a really great app with the next updates.

Great newsreader. Eventually, somebody has truly rethought how a newsreader should look. I love it. Yet, I will not use it, because I am an avid traveller who is reading feeds on his iPodtouch, MacBook Pro, and Desktop PC, as well as any browser I can get my hands on. Therefore, I require Newsgator syncing, which, at the time of writing, is only supported by NetNewsWire. I really hope the guys at Acrylic implement that feature soon... so I can start using Times.

Firstly, I'd advise some of the folks who don't like the "newspaper" look to choose a different program. The "traditional RSS reader" has as many issues as Times does, just different ones. Secondly, this is definitely a 1.0 product which is trying to do things in a new way ... some things are just poorly conceived and some of the good stuff is poorly coded and crashes but the intent is clear and the possibilities with some refinement are very cool. So what's to like? The "like a newspaper" layout is a refreshing change and for the most part works well (it's even better than a newspaper because you can scroll different columns independently) though it's unclear how to add content rather replacing what's already there. The "page turning" is a nice visual queue and keeps the reader in context as one skips from article to article. The inline pictures are well done and break up the text nicely. On the other hand, some things crash Times pretty hard. Deleting a feed for example and when it crashes any changes you made are lost as it doesn't seem to save things as it goes along. I've also gotten into a mode where Times will "turn the page" twice when you view an article which gets old (eye candy once is nice, twice is annoying). The first thing I had to do was add Times to APE's Master Exclusion List because it crashed as soon as the main window opened for me. I think the best way to decide if you like Times (and can live with its rough edges) is to try it and see. That's the joy of shareware.

I really love this program, i hope that more beautiful improvement will be introduced... but it's already a good program and an original/new way to use rss :)

I agree with the below comments: this program hangs a lot when initial feed gathering take place. Also, it does NOT work with the Spaces feature in OS X 10.5.

I cannot get Times to work properly on the MacBook. Hangs when initial feed gathering takes place, and after relaunch I see feeds in the main bar, but cannot drag to a page. Works fine on the MacPro.

A few thoughts, all of which have been submitted to the dev via Times' feedback form: - more keyboard shortcuts/navigation is needed. - a way to mark articles as read/unread is needed. Articles should be auto-marked as read once one reads it. - pages & individual feeds need a count indicator for unread/total feeds, both in the Pages bar and per-feed. This assumes the dev will implement marking stories as read at some point. Interesting app, and I am willing to give it a chance as my 'light' newsreader. I use NetNewsWire for the heavy lifting. Unfortunately though I think my demo will expire as this app matures through the 1.x stage, and I may not get to test any added features like the ones mentioned above. For such a brand-new app, perhaps an expiring beta might have been a better route? Seems this app will have some growth spurts in the coming weeks. With all the free newsreaders out there now, I would want to put this through the paces before plunking down cash for it. Looks great, but whether it will stand the test of time as far as readability/convenience, remains to be tested.

I love it! I have never been a fan of RSS but I've been testing this app longer than any RSS reader out there. (I've been using this one for a day now, as opposed to minutes) Posters below claim that it's buggy, and i concur, but I'm more than confident the developer will get those nasty bugs out there. Also do they claim that the way of using it is somewhat unnatural, but if you use it for a while you'll get the hang of how this app works and reckon it to be very consistent in it's behavior. I might just start using my browser for things other than just refreshing news sites :)

I love the concept, but it is like reading a newspaper that someone keeps stealing the pages from before you can read them. Articles are constantly replaced before you can even get to them (should stay until you decide to remove them like every other practical newsreader) and there is no way to tell consistently what is new and what has been read. Nor can you choose to mark an article read or unread. Occasionally (almost randomly) you will see a blue indicator next to a few articles, but never with complete accuracy. These are features essential to a "newsreader". Nice idea, but unusable for me at this point.

This app is totally unstable. No less than 5 crashes in about 10 minutes of use. Save your $30.

Let me divide three kind of arguments. a) workflow I have to quote FRIDGE here and, indeed, this application has serious usability problems, Seems as it was designed by someone not used to the RSS world and use. A GUI is not eyecandy only but an effective and down to the task at hand design. Good icons, beautiful details are welcome, we are all on a Mac after all, but all these must adhere to a logical process as it can predicted by simulations of everyday use of the average users. This is the center of users centric design. This applications lacks all of these above. You can't see, immediately see, which news are new. The simple red pillow is something good on a page with 3/4 elements but it pass by unnoticed in a page full of articles. A bold headline, as newspaper, could be a better sign. You have to read the news before the refresh cause there is no way to keep them in a unread status between session. The refresh and mark as read task is a All or None matter. You can't refresh or mark as read a single page or article. All or Nothing. Stupid (sorry but it is true). Read the review below for further strange behaviors. Maybe the next updates will change something of these but right now you have to deal with it in a current state and pay in the hope of changes. b) optimization It consumes after a fresh start 60MB RAM. After an hour of activity, it pumps up at 140MB RAM. This is simply unaccetable (NetNewsWire eats 23MB RAM). C'mon it consume more RAM than Photoshop with a full website mockup loaded! c) price Oh well! It is the price the Dev choosed so stop complaying. In my opinon it not worth of the price requested BUT, at a lower price AND in this state, i still will not consider buy it, so... ps. Don't try to Trim The Fat (or Xslimmer it) from this application. It will crash on startup indefinitely. psII. Stability wise, on my Machine it worked fast and well (MacBook last gen with 4GB RAM and Leo 10.5.2).

Positives first, it is kind of nice to look at a newspaper layout of your RSS feeds... But the positives ends there. If you are having more then 30 feeds you will go absolutely crazy in a day or two trying to keep up with your RSS feeds. As an example, there is now way to see which are the latest feeds! If the app refreshes every 10 min, the previous "new" feeds gets unmarked. So leaving the app running for an hour going to lunch (having Times set to check for new feeds every 10 min) you come back and have no clue which are the unread feeds (obviously there is now way to tell how many unread feeds you have either). Organizing your feeds is nightmarish. Let say you import 100 feeds (I did 42). The feeds gets placed in a feed drawer, from there you drag and drop your feeds into "pages" you have created (pages being like Times equal to Folders with the difference that you have to put a feed on a page in order to read the feed). So you drag and drop your feeds onto the pages and very quickly you have no clue which feeds you already placed and which other you have not. So you scroll down, look at the other pages, take out pen and paper to keep notes on what you are doing... This is a joke! It will drive less patient people with loads of feeds up the walls in a matter of minutes. It costs 30 bucks and is beta software. Crashes and buggs, beware!!! This is just eye candy without function. The whole point of RSS is to digest information in an easy manner, Times makes it harder then any other RSS reader. This is form before function - bad design! Do not get seduced by the eye candy, take the candy away and you have buggy beta software that does not focus on the applications main objective - reading and organizing your RSS feeds!

Times developer seem to have paid more attention to the license nagging than the announced functionality. I've no objection to the asked price. Time and the sales volume will tell if it's right or not. If the developer want to sell his product, he will no doubt adjust the price to fit the market. But, as of now, there is no way I'll buy a license. I'm sure the developer is competent and all that but, the application could have benefit from some more work and testing before the obviously premature release.

I was starting to get excited about Times, but after I took the time to set it up with my feeds it now crashes every time that I open it. The only way I was able to launch the app again was to remove the application data folder. Oh, and I just noticed it taking over 100 mb of ram right after launching. Too bad...

I have been using the beta for some time and it works great, Dustin has released many updates to it and I'm sure he will fix any problems people find very quickly.

Interestingly enough, no. I got tired of it crashing after about the fourth time to not even look at the preferences. Regardless it is the default. The default should not be that broken. Thanks for the tip though :)

Have you seen that you can change that behaviour?

Oh, I totally forgot to mention that the stupid pinwheel loving page curl effect covers up content. Awesome!

Wow, yet another application that is all flare and no substance. Worse yet it crashes constantly. In the 20 minutes that I used it I encountered: - One debilitating rendering issue (app went to pixelated squares until I esc. closed the page). - Screwed up graphics on the flap. - EXTREME sluggishness in all aspects of using the application. Click article, wait... wait... finally it opens. Add feed? Wait.. Open Shelf? Wait... - Shelf. Neat idea terrible implementation. If you try and drag a story to it you get a little arrow but no actual visual feedback to where you are putting the page. In an app with so much gratuitous animation I find that odd. It also leads to losing articles form the shelf because it is hard to see where you are placing them. Random pages hanging of the side. Stacks? Cool, but it extreme lag while opening them also no visual indication of reordering them, just an arrow... - Import from NetNewsWire? Yes please. Nothing. - Import from OPML? Crash. - Open article? Crash. - Oh, did I mention that it is EXTREMELY slow? Not much more to say than that. Lump this together with flashy but worthless apps like Disco. Thumbs-up on thinking outside of the box I guess... $30 dollars for an app as unstable and feature crippled as this is a rip off.

Echoing what others have said. It's a cool idea with a pretty nice implementation. The author needs to rethink the price though. $20 I *might* buy it, $15 I would probably buy it, but at $30 there is just no chance.

Have now had a chance to play with the demo of Times. Not sure it will replace NetNewsWire, but I really like the interface, layout, design aspects of this program. For newspapers and other headline-centric RSS feeds, this program makes going through the headlines much faster. Times may help me get through more feeds faster. For a 1.0 app, this is looking pretty finished and quite stable. The overall rating of 4 I've given this app reflects some room for the program to grow in overall ease of use, etc. As for price, $30 is certainly more than free, but for me it may be worth the cash for the ease of use and readability this program provides.

A very nicely designed application, with excellent use of Core Animation, etc. Drag and drop simplicity and very intuitive to use. BUT....the price is expensive when compared to established players in the market, such as NetNewswire and especially the ever improving Vienna, which is also an excellent product. I personally own a licence for Endo, but with some annoying glitches and variable support, I've not bothered with it in recent times. I could be persuaded to buy another licence for another product, but I doubt at this price. A shame.

I agree. The idea is great (perfect, actually), but the price is too high. I would gladly pay $15 for it, but until that happens I'll stick Newsfire.

This looks like just the sort of thing I'd want from an RSS reader and might finally get me using RSS more frequently. But $30? I'd never pay $30 for an RSS reader no matter how good it was.