Informal Brain

The Bad:

• I have had a number of crashes when I added a new page and then decided to remove it. Luckily a couple of restarts of the software managed to fix that up.
• The performance took a big hit once I imported more pages. I now have 11, and that seems to cause a few spinning beach balls.
• The cool page flip effect is just too slow to be useful on my MacBook. Not sure what other folks will see on Macs with better graphics cards.
• The “new” indicator fires off but frequently I can’t figure out what is new. Seems like the pages should turn blue and a blue dot should appear next to the article. Perhaps this is working but due to the layout it feels like you are hunting for the new thing which adds up to frustration. In the end, I might have opted for just saying, “Look At Me” there is new stuff, and leave the alerts at the page level.

The Good!

• Compared to the river of new view I spend less time hitting “J” to see all new articles. Robert Scoble wrote about this a few weeks ago when he mentioned he now reviews Google Reader not in expanded view and then looks at headlines that catch his eye. In effect this is what Times is causing you to do. I like it.
• I like the shelf. I can drag piles of things to read or blog later with ease. Cool feature.
• Fast way to glance at your RSS feeds when you only have a bit of time. For example, if I have 5 minutes a the computer I can see new things and come up to speed quickly. The layout forces you to be much more selective about what is really important to you and leave other feeds behind.

Areas for improvement:

• Might be nice if the sections bubbled their new items to the top of the list. Or if I add more then 1 feed to a section the one with the most new articles showed at the top. I could see why some people might not want this.
• Loose the “new” indicator at the article level. It makes me hunt for the new stuff rather then just reviewing the article landscape. A better way might be to show only “new” items and have a toggle.
• If an article has a photo or photos make sure it displays in the list. That is the most visually appealing part of the software. I found some inconsistency here especially when adding RSS feeds of comics or Flickr items. The software could get really cool if it better managed showing photos or even movies from articles rather then any text for example.
• Performance: In lots of places the effects like “slide” and “page curl” need to happen faster. They are just slow enough to be frustrating. It might be my machine compared to what the developers are using.

Nonetheless, as I mentioned before I bought a copy and I am using it rather then Google Reader. For now it is staying and that is a testimonial to a well designed and written piece of software. Thanks Acrylic folks!