Times. A personal RSS paper.

Times (a Mac OS RSS reader application) is a fresh approach to getting your daily feed of news and information. With Times you get a really slick application that gives you a quick glance at all your RSS feeds in an “almost real” newspaper UI.  After using iGoogle for a long time as my primary RSS aggregator, this application is extremely refreshing and a pleasure to look at.  The next question is, am I willing to buy it?

Install and setup
The basic install and setup is very easy using the standard drag and drop.  Once you launch Times it goes through a default install and setup which only takes a few seconds.  Simple.

Note: On both installs I attempted (both machines running Leopard) once Times loaded up, it immediately crashed.  After the second launch, it appears to be stable.

Your daily Times
The UI is great and obviously mimics the appearance of the printed newspaper. I found the default setup to be a great example of categories, content and feeds. But, the best part of this “newspaper” is that its yours and you can fill it with whatever news you want! 

To further enhance the paper feel of Times, they cleverly added a turned page effect to the article feed once you click on a headline.  It might be a little counterintuitive to the geeks out there, but to get back to the main page, you can just flip the turned up corner of the page.

Not a review
I didn’t have time to write up a full review, but as of this posting I find the concept very appealing and suggest you give it a look.  There are several other really cool features that I haven’t even touched on like the Shelf and how to add your own feeds. All in all, an amazing effort from creator Dustin MacDonald, age 19. Kudos!

My gut tells me that someone will eventually copy this general concept and make it a free web application.  In the meantime, if you’re a diehard RSS reader, this might appeal for $30.

Last second update
It looks like a patch is already out. As I was playing with Times and writing this post, I was prompted to get a update for several bugs. I’ll check this out for the trial period and maybe write a more in-depth review later.