New York Times Reader

Update.--See update below.

I've subscribed to the New York Times reader for a few years now and really enjoy it where I can download today's paper, along with the last week of papers to read as I would the print edition.

I'd love other newspapers to do something similar instead of having to access their Website for the junky, clunky presentations to read just today's news as it is in the print edition or read a few sections for the latest stories and information.

So it was interesting today when I checked the overnight backup and discovered why they occasionally go beserk and take far longer than the normal few minutes and why the Time Machine occasionally decides to backup nearly 30 Gigabytes of files instead of the normal few Gigabytes.

Well, it seems the New York Times FAQ's is very wrong about the space the application stores for the newspaper's files. They state in the FAQ that it consumes about 100 Megabytes. NOT! I found the NYT folder in my user library was 39.5 Gigabytes.

Really. That fucking large. It is a monster with multiple copies of files in multiple folders. I'm not sure if it's due to update of Adobe Air over the years or the update of the application, but something is really amiss or as Bob Uecker would say, "Just a wee bit high."

At this point I sent them an e-mail asking if I delete this entire folder will the application recreate it or if I remove the contents of the folder the application will recreate. Clearly they need a user option or tool to clear the folder.

So user of Mac's, check this folder (case and space sensitive):

Mac HD/Users/'name'/Library/Preferences/com.nyt.timesreader.'number'/Local Store/nyt

Use the finder's "Get Info" button to determine the size of the folder and contents. If it's a lot more than 100 Megabytes, it's too large and something is wrong.

Update.--Instead of waiting for a reply from the NY Times Reader office I ran a test. I removed the contents of the "nyt" folder, keeping the "nyt" folder, and opened the NY Times Reader application. This took awhile and didn't load the images, but closing and reopening it worked to restore everything for today with a 61 MBytes folder size. 

So, their advice about the size of the disk space is off a bit if just one day has this size, and a week's worth would be about 100-150 megabytes per day, clearly smaller than gigabytes it was using. And it's safe to check this folder now and then to remove the contents when it gets too large.