New York Times Article Skimmer
Sometimes a really interesting piece of software slips through the cracks here at Download Squad head office, and we miss covering it when it was first released. Sometimes when that happens, it's worth going back and pointing out what we missed. Though it was released back in February, we have somehow up until now neglected to mention the experimental New York Times Article Skimmer, and for that we feel shame.
Silliness aside, the Article Skimmer is an alternative way to experience the New York Times' content online, and in my opinion it is a better analog for reading a physical newspaper than most news websites are offering. Since you can't reasonably display the same amount of information on a web page as you can on a physical page of newsprint, the only way to make scanning for stories more efficient is to optimize the display for that purpose, and that's exactly what the Article Skimmer does.
The interface gives you a simple five-by-four grid that fills the page showing headlines and very short summaries for the top stories in the section that you select. Thumbnail images accompany many stories, and if there are more stories than fit on the page, you can quickly flip forward and back between pages. There are also keyboard shortcuts like the obvious arrow keys that will navigate you up and down through the different sections of the paper, and a couple of less obvious shortcut keys. Holding down the 's' key (for section) will show numbers beside each section -- type the number of the section you'd like to view, and press Enter all while still holding the 's' key to jump straight to that section. Hold the 'a' key (for article) and use the arrow keys to navigate the highlight to the article you'd like to view, then press Enter while still holding 'a'. As always, you'll need a free account with the New York Times to view most of the articles.
The announcement for the Article Skimmer notes that it doesn't yet have an official name, but that its purpose was to try to replicate the feeling of spreading out the Sunday times on a table while maybe eating brunch and skimming through the stories. I think this might be the closest we'll get to the tangible feeling of having a huge amount of articles right at our fingertips only a few inches away from each other.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
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The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
