After over a year of development, we've finally launched our first product: Times. Times is a new type of newsreader for Mac OS X, created by drastically rethinking the way you read news.
There are lots of so-called news readers on the Mac. Many, if not all of them, treat news like e-mail - a paradigm that the developers of these apps swear by. With these apps, every article is filtered into a long list as an email would, each bearing an 'unread' marker, to remind you to read it.
While this works great for a few blogs you want to catch up with, it is completely the wrong model for actual news, and makes reading the news a chore rather than an enjoyable experience. There are three big problems with it:
- One does not read every news article published, making unread markers harmful to an enjoyable experience
- Discovering news to read is hard to do with only a long list of headlines
- You can usually only see articles from one feed or source at a time
So what's wrong with websites? After all, a lot of people don't even use news readers. Visiting the actual websites you want to read is usually a better experience, for the reasons listed above. But it's not perfect. There's lots of overhead, advertisements, you have to constantly refresh, and it's tough to keep track of many sites at once.
Times solves all of these problems and more. Instead of treating news like e-mail, Times presents articles on a newspaper-esque page, rich with headlines, descriptions, and photos. Pages in Times are divided into sections of varied importance, each showing one or more feeds. This interface lets you easily scan through your news, and discover articles that you want to read.

With Times, keeping up with news is now both feasible and enjoyable. Be sure to try it out for yourself!
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