Times, the super secret project I've been working on for the past year and a half, will finally be released on Friday. What is Times? Why make Times? I hope to briefly answer all of those questions here.

Times is the evolution of my distaste for the current lineup of RSS readers on the Mac. I have tried nearly every one, and they're all great apps, but the way they treat news is useless to me. First of all, unread counts are really annoying. Unlike email, I do not want to read every single article published. Second, due to the nature of RSS, feeds usually only provide a short preview of the article, forcing you to click through to your browser to read the full story. And long lists of headlines are simply uninteresting. I always found it much better to simply go to the websites I want to visit and check up on the news there.

Of course, that isn't exactly ideal. It is difficult to routinely visit a bunch of websites without skipping a few because of time constraints or forgetfulness. Some desktop newsreader features are handy - like notification of new content and a centralized place to get news. I thought there had to be a better solution, but there wasn't.

But make yet another Mac newsreader? That's crazy - or is it? Times aims to be the best of both worlds: a sleek hybrid of RSS and web technology, making news actually fun and easy to read. Being an OS X app, the experience is far better than a web app could ever be. You'll see soon enough, but Times makes discovering news easier than ever by putting multiple feeds on one page, divided into different areas. Photos and descriptions help to distinguish the interesting stories from the lame ones. And obviously, you can have multiple pages for different subjects.


Innovative features? Times has those, too.

Ever browse a website in Safari, and finding yourself opening new tabs for a bunch of links that look interesting? Here came the idea for the Shelf, a place where you can easily queue up or save articles for later reading. Just drag any article and place it down. You can even make stacks.


RSS has its own inconvenient truth: lack of content. Most (if not all) major news sites simply do not provide full content in their feeds, forcing you to read that story in your browser. Because this may never change, Times does the next best thing and downloads the article from its website. Using what may be considered witchcraft and wizardry, these articles are individually formatted for easier reading, removing all overhead and advertisements.


And after a year of solid development, it is finally time for release. While I had lots of ideas for Times, not all of them could fit into 1.0. For example, if you subscribe to a few blogs that you really want to read every post of, Times 1.0 isn't the best place to read them. If you want to design your own page layouts, you can't yet. These are some of the features that are high on the list for future versions.

That being said, a lot of work has gone into 1.0, and it is pretty solid. Since I've been using it, I read much more interesting news than I could have ever before. In the next few weeks, I'll be going into more detail about the development and design of Times here. Come Friday, make sure to try it out and see if it works for you.