May 3, 2008

Regarding Times

So Times-- the just-released feedreader from Acrylic Apps-- has been getting some mixed press, particularly for its unorthodox style of navigation. Most people dislike the way it works, but after using it thoroughly for a day, it seems like the problems stem from the way you organize your subscriptions.

Most people who use feedreaders, I imagine, read two kinds of content: news and weblogs. Consider "news" to be reporting and coverage, and specify "weblogs" as the more personal or analytical content you read.

In NetNewsWire, I structure my feeds into two categories: "General News" and "Everything Else". The former hosts feeds that publish very frequently-- sometimes dozens of times a day. I like their content, but I usually only read about a third or half of their cumulative unread account because of how much there is to read. The opposite is true for the latter, however: I try to read everything from weblogs, usually because they're updated at a rate I can stay with.

The reality is that these two kinds of content are better-suited in different viewing modes. Weblog content is updated less frequently, so a simple list makes it easier to read one thing and then move on to the next. A news site like Engadget or Gizmodo, however, publishes so frequently that in a "list mode", I often just skip right through everything they publish. Times attempts to remedy this problem with formatted pages.

Now for an experiment (feel free to play along). Here's a page I made in Times for gathering all my weblog content:

times_weblogs.png

This is absolutely frustrating to navigate; no matter which way I sort them, I can't fit all my feeds into this format, and none of them publish frequently enough to warrant me scrolling down constantly to check for an update.

Instead, I placed all of my Apple-related news into a single page:

times_news.png

I love this. I usually skim through the Macworld, Digg and TidBITS stories in NetNewsWire, but here they have prominence; having some organization makes them far easier to navigate and pick out which stories I'd like to read.

It's kind of like the difference between receiving email updates and just visiting the website. The most common way of receiving "aggregated" news updates, prior to RSS, was by getting an email alert. But what if you got an email alert every time the New York Times updated their front page? You'd be receiving a swarm of emails a day, and getting them in that format would get old really fast.

Seeing my "Apple Nerdery" news in Times makes it feel less chaotic, and I love it.

As a whole, I really like Times, and once you get past the issue of what to put in there, it's fantastically useful. My biggest gripe so far has been the issue of bugs, but it would be naïve to dismiss Times solely on that mark; 1.0 releases inevitably have problems, and once they're ironed out, I wouldn't hesitate recommending it.