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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Thursday, February 19, 2009

My new Home Page, The New York Times

I hate newspapers. I hate the way they feel, I hate reading 2 paragraphs and then hunting around for the rest of the article. I hate folding those huge pages. I just never ever liked reading the paper. But I do like the cover page. I look at the paper when I see it.

Online never really did it for me either. I disliked the way that most newspaper websites layout their pages. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal online does the best job.

But, I love the New York Times iPhone app. It’s easily skimmable and glanceable. Of course it’s slow and buggy and crashes pretty much all the time. In fact I launched it over an hour ago on my iPhone and it’s still Updating… but when it works it’s great.

The other day I saw a link to a new New York Times Prototype called the Article Skimmer. It’s simply fantastic. It’s entirely designed for some one like me. I just want to glance at the news every day, and drill into the articles I might find interesting. You can read about it here.

They have done a really good job at actually bringing the best aspects of the analog paper including sections and a new “most emailed” feature, and they have awesome keyboard shortcuts. They also seem to be using the little square photo that the iPhone also uses to make the articles pop.

This is my new Homepage, the Article Skimmer

image

Compare this to the current New York Times web page.

image 

The Skimmer is just better in every way.

 

Friday, February 20, 2009 7:45:52 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
The biggest problem with news papers online is that they try to reproduce a paper.
Saturday, February 21, 2009 8:20:44 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Have you heard of the New York Times Reader?
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/timesreader.html

It's kinda like a mix between the newspaper experience, and the online experience. But very smooth, and done in WPF.

Are paper newspapers that bad? Going to the jump page is kinda annoying, but 2 paragraphs? My newspaper shows usually a couple more than that. Probably the only thing I don't like about the paper is that it kills trees, and taking the time to cut out an interesting tidbit takes some time.

The concern I have for reading stuff online is harming your eyesight. That's about it. Oh, and though my newspaper's website is pretty good at covering a lot of topics and things, but there usually aren't coupons (I'm thrifty), and sometimes there's special content pages inside the Chronicle that doesn't have an online counterpart (yet).
Monday, March 09, 2009 12:45:11 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I hate having to flip through pages to see what I was already reading as well. This looks like a terrific application.
Monday, March 16, 2009 9:16:47 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I always wanted to be a newspaper type of guy... but it just never worked out for me. Online news and radio is how I get my news.

My homepage is set to Google News. Two thumbs up from me.
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