Times moves away the statistics, “Read, Unread”, email style app, and moves towards a newspaper interface.  Complete with page curl effect, Times turns your RSS into a virtual newspaper, with primary, stories, headlines, secondary stories and side columns.

                                                  Times is a leopard only app, and takes advantage of some leopard only features to make it’s user interface possible, such as Core animation.  On certain mac models, where GPU (graphics) power is low, such as the macbook and the mac mini,  Times intelligently switches to a “page slide” effect instead of the page curl, no user intervention needed.  The idea of “read” and “unread” stories is completely optional, thanks to a tick-box that allows you to turn off the marking of newly downloaded stories as “unread”.  Times also features an innovative, and as with the rest of the app, very visual, “stack”, for marking stories for later use or reading, replacing the tradition “flagged items” method.

My only discrepancy with Times is it’s relatively unknown trial restrictions, these restrictions are fairly unclear when you take the app for a test-drive, and it would be nice if the 30 day trial was a true trial.

Overall, Times is a great app, i now use it as my main RSS reader, it fits the anecdote of the digital newspaper that was used to explain RSS in the early days, and helps move RSS forward.

 Times has an Across The Pod Rating of 4/5, a single license costs $30, from the developer, at Acrylic Apps.

The actual typography and writing tools of Scrivener are very polished, and a very handy full screen mode offers distraction free writing when needed, but this is besides the point.

 There is something fundamentally different about Scrivener compared to other software products in its class- Scrivener is designed to write content.  In many cases, the finished product is not what you see, as i write this, i don’t need to write it in the exact same fashion that it will appear on the site (something which effectively, all word processors do), i just need to have good writing tools.  Scrivener offers a variety of templates for novels, radio drama’s and plays, as well as the obligatory “blank”.  The key to the operation is the one-window nature of the application.  Within one window (and quite importantly, one application) i can store an entire project, its chapters, notes, and even research i have done for the article.  This is what sets scrivener apart, scrivener is not a word processor, it is a content processor.  Later, when you want your work exported to the required format, scrivener’s export function takes care of producing an exported file to the users specifications.  Regrettably,  Scrivener can not handle files from Apple’s Pages directly when importing.  What is most frustrating is seeing the potential scrivener has, but only being able to access what it has now, to really complete the package, Scrivener could really do with some templates for other types of contents such as columns and online articles, as well as an additional plug-in to directly post Scrivener articles to web-sites (such as wordpress and moveable type) via the XML-RPC standard. Overall, Scrivener is a revolution in content creation, but could do with just a tad more work.