Informal Brain

Ok, so the title is perhaps a bit dramatic, but I must admit it is partially true. So how many of you use a “river of news” RSS reader? I have been trying a bit of an experiment where I have feed links from Safari on my iPhone for my most frequently visited RSS locations. These might be things where I want to be on top of the news like MacRumors or Google News. But for the rest of my feeds I have subscribed only the most important summary feeds from people and web sites into Times.

This has had two key benefits. First, I don’t spend hours of spare time slowly scrolling through a page of news in the mobile version of Google Reader. I just jump to the Safari feed links and see the top stories. Since I have limited my feeds to only key items this limited my mobile browsing. Lots of time back here. Second, at home when I get in front of the computer I glance through my Times pages dragging key articles to the shelf. Then I go back and work through the shelf blogging or emailing the ones which I find interesting. Not having to surf through pages of articles using “J” or “Space” in Google Reader saves LOTS of time. Amazing amounts of time in fact, and I don’t feel any less connected to the discussion.

Give Times from Acrylic a try. The latest update which came out tonight has stabilized things for me. So far it has been working great, and the team has been super responsive to bug and crash reports from the early adopter user group.