Author Archive

In September of 2006, the New York Times released their ‘Times Reader’ for the PC. Times Reader is a desktop client for reading the New York Times the way it was designed to be read: as a newspaper. More accurate layout and typography makes reading the Times a much more enjoyable experience overall. The idea was to have a newspaper that arrived on your desktop each morning, preventing a trip to the front door in your favorite bath robe.

After much evolution and over a year and a half later, the Mac-compatible beta has finally arrived, with only a few weaknesses to be found.

For awhile now, it has been relatively safe to crown Google as the king of web-based feed readers. The ability to access favorite feeds anywhere through the everyone-and-their-dog-has-one Google account has been indispensable to news-addicts such as myself. Google Reader’s interface (while excellent for a web-based solution) can often leave something to be desired, and still doesn’t quite live up to competitive desktop-based newsreaders.

This is where ReadAir by Adam McGrath steps in. ReadAir is a a desktop interface to Google Reader, courtesy of Adobe’s somewhat-new AIR platform. The result is a very comfortable and beautiful Mac-friendly reading experience that lives outside of your favorite browser. As soon as ReadAir is installed and launched, the user is presented with a simple account login screen, and some General Preferences to control how often feeds are refreshed.