Acrylic’s Times

There’s been a lot of wooshy-wooshy going around in the Mac blog-sphere about Times, the new, journal format RSS reader for our beloved (I know…) platform.

Seems like its initial launch didn’t go so smooth, a lot of nasty bugs popped-up which kinda gave the poor app a bad start. So I decided to wait a couple of days for the announced bug-fix releases and then give it a go.

Today is that day.

Times has the same annoying habit most RSS-readers have. They come with a ton of built-in feeds, most of which I don’t give a damn about.

So task one was obvious, get rid of all the bloody feeds and that’s where the trouble started. Times actually crashed twice on me before I could†successfully†delete the feeds, whereas it has absolutely no problem importing them from NetNewsWire.

Then comes part two, my feeds are back, let’s organise them. Yeah uhm… wait… I have… about 20 technology related newsfeeds in 4 different languages, that is never going to fit on the Technology page. So I actually had to ditch some stuff in the Sports part (something I am not interested in except for the Olympics). Then I went on organising the rest of the feeds and I absolutely love it, it actually is very refreshing and productive to read feeds this way.

Then comes the page-curl feature when you click on an article. That feature, is, well, shit. Though it works it looks horribly, the animation is not smooth and there’s no subpixel anti-aliassing which creates a seriously odd effect.

This here on the left is the result, and that, my friends, just isn’t purty, something Core Animation is actually really good at (and Macs in general).

Seconds, the way the article is rendered when reading the full article is actually a very plain, default, Safari/Mail/NW type of rendering, I really did expect a more newspapery-style there.

†

So what I need in Times:

• more pages
• renaming of pages
• some smooth core animation magic
• a different xslt-sheet for the article-reading part