Acrylic Ships Newspaper-Like Reader For Macintosh

Acrylic Software on Friday launched a newsreader that displays RSS feeds on the Mac in a newspaper-like format.

Called Times, the $30 software draws headlines, photos, and text from news feeds, and lets users build their own personal newspapers by dropping content into separate areas to create pages for different subjects. Unlike other newsreaders, Times shows an entire story on its own, and doesn't launch the article in a separate Web browser.

Acrylic said it designed Times with the idea that people prefer to scan the news, and pick the article or two that they want to read. The software lets users scroll each section individually to find articles of interest. The software also includes a feature called the Shelf, which sorts and saves articles for reading later. Dragging an article automatically brings up the Shelf, which can be placed anywhere on the desktop. Users can create stacks of shelves and categorize them.

Other features include notification of new articles, and the ability to e-mail articles or send them to social Web sites Facebook and Digg.

The Times newsreader requires Leopard, formally known as Mac OS X 10.5. In making the software, Acrylic leveraged a number of advanced technologies in Leopard, such as Core Animation. Times can be downloaded from Acrylic's Web site.

Competitors of Acrylic include NewsGator Technologies, which distributes the NetNewsWire reader for the Mac. The company in July introduced a mobile newsreader tailored for the Apple iPhone. The reader takes advantage of the device's unique multitouch screen for accessing, reading, and marking feeds as read.

In addition, the mobile service syncs with NetNewsWire for the Mac, so feeds read on one service are marked as read on the other.