Ian: you say you use both NNW and Times (NNW for skimming, Times for feeds you read). I’d be curious to know how many feeds you have in each (excluding the NNW ones that duplicate the ones in Times)?

I feel bad about doing this (because of bandwidth), but when I started using Times for real I migrated all the subscriptions that I’d copied to Times into a “Times” folder in NNW. Originally I turned off refreshing for the folder, but a day later I turned it back on. Now I read articles in Times first, then after I’ve skimmed through stuff in NNW I take a look at the sidebar to see if there’s any numbers next to feeds that I missed in Times.

I’m fervently hoping that the unread marking gets fixed for the next minor release.

In one of those mixed blessings syncing isn’t an issue for me since I never leave the house. That’s a good call that syncing is another reason to stick with NNW, though. I didn’t think to mention that.

(1.) I read RSS on my iPhone, MacBook & iMac, keeping everything in sync is a must and thanks to Newsgator this is done perfectly. Times offers no syncing feature.

(2.) The ‘unread’ blue dot indicators are a disaster, this just never works properly for me and I end up missing stories.

There is a default keyboard shortcut for backing out of an article. Just hit esc.

We can only hope that the dev has learned something about the importance of beta testers.

Also, to add on regarding PPC support: I use a 15″ PowerBook G4 and haven’t seen many problems, aside from the one crash I had after trying NNW importing. But performance problems persist, indeed.

That was the first (and last) couple hours that I ran it.

It may very well be great program. It looks interesting. But the developer really has to work on first impressions.

@Hans and Jason: I wouldn’t be surprised at all to hear that there’s issues with PPC hardware and Times. It also wouldn’t surprise me to hear the developer tested on Intel and just assumed it would work across architectures. Definitely worth sending a bug report about the problem.

@Grover: The main reason I prefer RSS to visiting sites every day or two is because an RSS client saves me time and effort (the sites I read regularly aren’t necessarily updated regularly). I also enjoy reading and browsing in a unified interface without the distractions of ads and so forth (for those sites that offer full-text feeds). The ability to see headlines side-by-side sites writing about similar topics is another benefit; if I were visiting the sites, I wouldn’t be able to do this.

It took me a while to get into RSS clients, actually, because I figured that visiting the sites was just as good, but I finally got sick of loading pages only to discover no updates (and no fast way to see that there were no updates if I didn’t remember the latest headline). I have about 20-25 sites that I follow closely (with varying regularity of updates), so an RSS reader makes life much simpler.

feeds where I read every headline and often read every article

In these cases, why are you using feeds at all? Why wouldn’t you just visit the site? I’m not trying to be a jerk, I’m genuinely asking.

I think it looks like a great program, and based on this review it fits the way I use RSS perfectly, but on my 12″ G4 PowerBook, it crashes every time.

I’ve read that one of the Leopard graphics updates breaks something on the 12″ PowerBook (there is a crashing problem with DVD playback as well) so maybe it has something to do with the animation used by Times and this bug, but it’s frustrating either way.

On the flip side I haven’t bothered submitting a bug report so I guess I have no right to complain until I’ve at least taken that step.

…maybe next week…

I really liked Times too, but when it crash my machine, a PowerBook G4 12″, every time I run it, I simply can not use it. Hopefully it will be better eventually, and I can start using it again.

I too have been using Times for a few days now… although i haven’t paid for it yet.. i too have parked it right next to NNW in my dock.

Fully agree with what you’ve said, and also agree about bugs. I’m hoping that the bugs will be ironed out between now and when my trial ends ;)

Did you try out the page curl animation for reading feeds? I found that on my core2 duo macbook that animation wasn’t even visible… which i was a bit surprised by.

About the best you’ve got at the moment is a contextual menu when you click on an article headline on a page that allows you to copy the link to the clipboard or open it in your browser. EagleFiler doesn’t capture from Times, but you can use the drop-pad to snag stuff quickly by dragging the headline.

I’ve sent a support request for third party software integration, and I’m sure other people have as well, so hopefully it’s a feature that we’ll see added down the road.

Does it work well with other programs? One of the strengths of NNW is how easy it is to send things to Twitterific/MarsEdit/EagleFiler…