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.

Sure, you always mean to keep up on the news by reading dozens of interesting articles every day about politics, the economy, and you know, tech news. But who has the time? Great Summary is here to help. Just copy the URL of an article that's so long you get exhausted by looking at it, decide how many lines of text you're actually willing to put up with (from 1 to 100), and push the summarize button. Great Summary will find the most important points of the article, saving you valuable minutes, or even seconds of time.

At least that's the idea. In practice, the web service could use some more work. I tried it on several news articles from a number of different web sites, and more often than not, Great Summary decided that the tags or site navigation menus were worth dedicating a line to.

That said, the service did usually pick out some of the most fact-filled lines in an article, so it looks like the developers are onto something. If you don't care about story structure or narrative flow, Great Summary might be worth checking out. But I wouldn't exactly rely on it as a primary means of skimming the daily news just yet.

You can also use the service to summarize chunks of text that you copy and paste. Want to know how it handles this article? Read the summary after the break.

[via Lifehacker]