Detailed ArsTechnica review of Times, an attractive RSS newsreader that displays headlines and summary in a newspaper print-like layout.

Times’ main window… is easily one of the app’s greatest strengths. Eschewing the current standard of a left sidebar containing feeds with a central content area for browsing articles, Times separates itself from the pack by donning the physical appearance of a newspaper (other pages popping out from behind the main window is an appreciated touch of polish).

Clearly, Times is a unique RSS reader, probably less for the power RSS user, and more for the typical Mac user who finds NetNewsWire to be daunting. It’s yet another way to gather, store, retrieve yet more information.

Too much information, however, is perhaps Times’ greatest achilles’ heel. Times’ layout for each Page essentially contains three main sections for feeds, the most prominent area being the top left section which can hold a single feed, with the other two areas tacking on extra feeds in the order that you add or manually arrange them.

What we want is quick, elegant access to information that we control. That’s the beauty of RSS, often lost in the typical RSS reader which provides a ‘more is less’ interface.

Times excels at bringing some great ideas to the RSS table, wrapped up in a refreshing UI that offers a bird’s-eye view of what’s going on.

My NoodleMac review when Times was released.

Safari security issues giving you the blues? Nitesh Dhanjani and StopBadware.org are livid blue, calling the Safari ‘carpet bomb’ flaw a serious security risk.

Dhanjani originally discovered than (sic) it is possible for a booby-trapped Web site to litter the user’s Desktop (Windows) or Downloads directory (~/Downloads/ in OSX) with executables masquerading as legitimate icons.

If it’s not natural disasters or global warming or the economy, now Mac users have to watch out for drive-by malware on malicious web sites. Surely you know which ones are malicious, right? Dhanjani:

This can happen because the Safari browser cannot be configured to obtain the user’s permission before it downloads a resource. Safari downloads the resource without the user’s consent and places it in a default location (unless changed).

One report says Apple plans a fix in Safari 3.2, possibly due in September. If so, how bad can the ‘carpet bomb’ be?

No matter how the numbers are sliced and diced, Apple’s Mac sales are exploding, mostly in the above $1,000 price range, of course. Joe Wilcox in AppleWatch:

Apple’s retail market share is 14 percent, and two-thirds for PCs costing $1,000 or more. Should I repeat those numbers? The share data is for first-quarter brick-and-mortar stores, as tabulated by the NPD Group. Apple’s market share is but one measure of success. Sales growth is way up, while Windows desktop PC sales are way down.

That’s for retail sales. The Mac is double digit market share over all, and a commanding share of the premium (read: highly profitable) notebook market.

Apple’s retail stores aren’t just places to buy Mac products. They’re part of a larger end-to-end value chain—and with it the promise of a certain kind of experience.

That’s Apple’s perfect storm; the end-to-end value chain, the whole experience; Mac, iPod, iPhone, all in an OS X wrapper.

Preview release of Mozilla’s big dawg browser. Easier, simplified, prettier, more secure, faster describe the next generation of Firefox.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 33 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 14,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

Nice, but use at your own risk.

Mark your iCal for this one. The Mac in your pocket will be eclipsed by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 in four years, according to Eddie Wu, a Microsoft manager in Asia.

Microsoft currently focuses its efforts on promoting the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system (OS) and the company has no plans to launch Windows Mobile 7 until 2009

Meanwhile, Germany’s ZDNet said Intel’s ultra mobile Atom processors will show up in Apple’s Mac-in-your-pocket iPhone (currently with 26% of the U.S. smart phone market), a headline completely disavowed by Intel. Unsubstantiated rumors do not an accurate headline make.

Fake Steve does an analysis of Why Dell will not bounce back. Funny, self indulgent piece, but loaded with the ring of truth. From FSJ:

Bottom line is this: the only innovations worth making are the ones involving product ideas and product design. I mean, Duh. Right? It’s pretty obvious. What’s amazing to me is how few companies actually seem to realize it. To sustain an edge in any market you must make better products than your competitors, consistently, over and over and over again. Just making the same products as everyone else but taking a little friction out of the system can give you an advantage, but only a temporary one.