Read The New York Times with Adobe Air

Daniel Pataki — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:02:36 +0000

In my limited experience with newspapers, I got the sense that they are not the ones leading the technological revolution. Today I found out that The New York Times has just released an Adobe Air application called The New York Times Reader, for reading their famous newspaper on your desktop. Since “real life”, non-tech companies tend to favor technology at least 20 years old this initiative comes as a breath of fresh air (no pun intended), especially since it is really well implemented, it looks and feels great.

Sadly the app is not completely free. I usually only look at headlines because I don’t have a huge amount of time, and for that it is perfect. You can click around in the various sections and read excerpts and titles. You can also read the main page articles and the business articles for free. You will need a subscription though to access the full content on the other pages. There is also a feed reader type “Latest News” section, which you can view freel for all the breaking news.

If you’re already a subscriber the whole app is completely free. If you don’t have a Times subscription yet, you can subscribe for $3.5 a week. I think this is a small price to pay for the NYT, especially if you live anywhere off the US coastline. If you enjoy reading newspapers, but you don’t have the time to grab a copy each day, I think the New York Times reader is a great application.

(via Lifehacker)

Tags: adobe air, new york times, newspaper, nyt

Create RSS Feed Newspapers

Martin — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:30:32 +0000

Computers are really nice for information gathering but nothing beats reading a book or newspaper on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee at a breakfast table. That’s probably what the developers of Feed Journal thought as well because they have developed an application that transforms RSS feeds into a newspaper format which can then be printed and read offline.

After setting up an account at Feed Journal you can start adding the RSS feeds that should be included in your personalized newspaper. A maximum number of eight articles per RSS feed can be included in each newspaper that you create. Rather unfortunate is the fact that only the eight latest articles are displayed which means that you can’t create a newspaper with all the interesting articles of the last week because those are not available anymore.

You could however print one daily to cover all articles. Users can change some settings of the newspaper at account setup, namely the format of the newspaper which is by default A4, the number of columns and the margin.

The results are pretty nice but I’m missing some options that would enhance the usability. First, I would like to see a way to add a number of feeds at once. You can only add one feed at a time currently which is not that user friendly if you want to add ten or even fifty feeds. A way to import feeds from an opml would be welcome.

The second option that I would like to see is to be able to pick more articles from a website. The current limit of eight articles does not even come close the the daily amount of articles published at sites like Techcrunch or Lifehacker.

Feed Journal offers a unique promising idea. Blog owners can offer their readers a personalized newspaper, the basic account is free which has however several limits.

Tags: feed journal, feed-reader, feeds, newspaper, rss feed

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Read The New York Times with Adobe Air

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