The Right Times for Fresh Air

There was always the possibility that news about the pending Microsoft-Yahoo merger would break on Saturday. Final discussions were rumored to be underway, with Microsoft upping its offer to $33 a share. The news unexpectedly broke while I was out at the mall with my daughter and her friend before taking them to their Saturday evening choir practice.

We arrived at the mall around 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time, and I wouldn't be able to get home until after 9 p.m. Normally, I wouldn't carry a laptop with me. But I've been testing a MacBook Air (with favorable but still mixed results), which was light enough to carry around the whole day. So, I had a computer with me and the means to easily blog three posts on Saturday afternoon and into evening. I initially camped out in a Panera Bread and tapped into the free hot spot.

A second testing product proved invaluable in my quickly getting on the breaking Microsoft story. I've been having trouble with RSS reader NetNewsWire, both on the MacBook Air and on a more heftily configured MacBook Pro. I loathe the day the software went free. You get what you pay for, as they say. My NetNewsWire problems, mainly frequent crashes, started months after the software became free; there were few problems when NewsGator charged for the RSS reader. I actually prefer NewsFire for its speed and performance, but not its presentation. Saturday afternoon, I was looking for a NetNewsWire replacement.

Googling led me in a roundabout way to a new RSS reader that was released on Friday, May 2, called Times. The Acrylic software product takes RSS feeds from their e-mail-like presentation and formats them in a newspaper-like layout. The motif isn't new, but the approach is fairly fresh for feeds. The Times interface reminds one of the New York Times Reader, which is built on Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation. Times taps into Mac OS X's Core Animation and Core Image capabilities.

I had downloaded Times and was testing it for the first time around 5 p.m. on Saturday. The RSS reader flows feeds into columns. Around 5:10 p.m. a New York Times story about Microsoft withdrawing the Yahoo bid appeared in the center column. Twenty minutes later, I received an e-mail alert from the Wall Street Journal Online. Times got the news faster.

I quickly wrote most of my first post from the Panera Bread. But the Wi-Fi was flakier than the store's bread and bagels. So I dropped my daughter and her friend at choir and returned to the mall, where I camped out at the local Starbucks. Because I am an AT&T broadband and U-verse IPTV customer, the hot spot's use was free—and much faster and more reliable than Panera's free-to-anybody Wi-Fi access point. Like I said, you get what you pay for.

But I encountered another problem: interruptions. Starbucks patrons kept stopping to ask about the MacBook Air. Was that really an Air? Did I like it? Was it really lightweight? Was it durable? Almost everyone wanted to know if the portable was flimsy, which I affirmed it wasn't. The Air may be thin, but it's surprisingly rugged.

I finished all my work from the Starbucks, picked up my daughter and returned home. I wanted to get back to testing Times. I found the presentation to be quite appealing. But the software was buggy. It wouldn't import feeds directly from NetNewsWire or an OPML file. This afternoon I downloaded Version 1.02, which fixed the import problem.

Now I'm looking at the beautiful user interface and wondering about limitations. I subscribe to 455 feeds. Looks like I have to manually drag them to the newspaper layout for them to appear. That's a helluva lot of work; the benefits don't justify the time I would need to spend. Also, I strongly suspect the number of feeds will overwhelm the presentation method. But I'm not done experimenting with Times yet. I love the motif. I'm going to give Times more time.

In future posts, I will blog more specifically about the MacBook Air and Times.

Posted by Joe Wilcox on May 5, 2008 3:53 PM