If there’s one product category where there is no shortage of options for Mac users, it’s newsreaders. NetNewsWire, NewsFire, NewsLife, and company are being joined by Times, a newsreader that takes a different approach.

Many of the existing newsreaders approach news feeds like an email client handles emails: you have a list of headlines and you click on each headline to read on. For the most part, these newsreaders do what they do well.

Times approaches feeds differently. Times looks and feels less like a desktop app, and more like a physical newspaper. The result is a newsreader that, like a newspaper, allows you to quickly glance over the headlines and article blurbs all at once. So how well does it work? Let’s find out.

Times’ user interface isn’t exactly standard, but it isn’t overdone either. The visual effects are subtle natural extensions of the user interface. And the non-standard interface reinforces the newspaper metaphor that Times uses, which works well for more visual people.

By default, Times breaks down articles into five “pages” — World, Technology, Science, Entertainment, and Sports. You can add pages, delete them, and rename them as you please. Adding feeds to each page is as simple as dragging and dropping a feed to a page. Feeds are displayed in a Dashboard-like collapsable panel:

Each page has three sections for feeds; two sections display “featured” feeds of your choosing, the third section shows all feeds listed on a page. In my opinion Times is not ideally suited if you subscribe to lots of feeds, but if you subscribe to a handful of feeds per page, Times works reasonably well.

One nice touch is that TImes will auto-detect feeds for any web site. Enter the URL and Times will find the feeds for you. Times ties into your Safari bookmarks, allowing you to instantly add feeds for any bookmarked site. And yes, it will detect multiple feeds belonging to a site, and will allow you to choose which you want to subscribe to.

One more feature I want to mention is the shelf. The shelf is basically an organization tool allowing you to set aside articles for later reading. Drag a headline, and the shelf will appear, allowing you to drop the article onto the shelf. The shelf has four spots, but each spot on the shelf allows you to “stack” articles. For example, you can have one stack with sports articles, another for Mac articles, and so on. The shelf and stacks works much like the Dock; mouse over an article or stack of articles to preview the titles, click an article to read it, drag an article off the shelf to remove it. The shelf is not expandable; four spots is all you have. Also, you can’t rearrange items on the shelf, aside from moving them into stacks. Still, it’s a clever idea, and will make setting aside articles easier.

Times is definitely worth a look. It’s a 1.0 release (technically 1.0.1), so some features are less developed than they could be, but it shows great promise. Times requires Mac OS X 10.5, and the developer suggests a broadband connection. It costs $30, but a 14-day demo is available. For details, visit http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/.