Ever since 10.5 came out, I’ve been using Mail.app for my RSS reader, because I liked the convenience of having my feeds and mail together. Unfortunately, I’ve been slowly adding more and more feeds to the list, creating a relatively long list of feeds, which has led me to NOT add interesting blogs to the list out of fear of it getting out of hand. After purchasing the MacHeist 3 bundle last week, I had the opportunity to try out Times RSS reader.
Times is a pleasant looking app and appears to work very well when you have logically grouped content (news is news is news is news). The layout and “newspaper”-y feel was very intriguing and was pretty successful with a homogenous collection of feeds (like the default news). Unfortunately, as I began importing my existing feeds (which include news, tech blogs + planets, delicious and twitter feeds), I had a hard time keeping it under control. The loss of control and fear of missing an interesting post (say, if it scrolled off the page before I looked) is what ultimately drove me away.
I think there is a lot of potential in the way the Times team have rethought RSS reading, but it needs to be better at presenting new content to me — unlike world news, I am generally interested in the vast majority of my tech feeds. Finally, it really needs a way to aggregate low-volume feeds into one pane. Some of the blogs I read are only occasionally updated (A List Apart, Joel on Software, etc), which make devoting full columns to these feeds feel wasteful.
An interesting experiment, which at least separated my reading habits from Mail.app. I’ve now moved on to NetNewsWire because it seems to successfully address the reading experience I didn’t know I was missing.
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