Categorized | Announcements & News

Times Reader 2.0 – Fast, Slick and Wonderful

Posted on 11 May 2009 by


Times Reader

No sooner did I post my piece on Frank Rich’s look at the current struggles facing the newspaper industry than I saw a piece from GottaBeMobile’s Warner Crocker that The New York Times Reader Version 2.0 had launched.

The Times Reader for Windows was remarkably innovative when it was first released. It came much closer to the experience of reading a dead tree paper than anything else and I found it to be superb on my tabletpcs. Sure, it was a bit slow to sync content, but you could change fonts and zoom in and out with ease. When the Mac version was released it was a bit of a disappointment. It was less polished and not nearly as flexible and configurable.

Version 2.0 of the Reader takes a different approach. Built on Adobe Air, the Reader is platform agnostic. AND FAST!!! Load times are next to nothing, the text and image quality is superb and it just feels great to navigate and read.

Oh, and it isn’t free! To get the full content delivered, you need to either subscribe to the paper or pay $3.45 a week. Considering the need to keep real journalism employed, it is pretty reasonable for the experience it offers.

You can get it here.

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- who has written 2793 posts on Gear Diary.

Having a father who was heavily involved in early laser and fiber-optical research, Dan grew up surrounded by technology and gadgets. Dan’s father brought home one of the very first video games when he was young and Dan remembers seeing a “pre-release” touchtone phone. (When he asked his father what the “#” and “*” buttons were his dad said, “Some day, far in the future, we’ll have some use for them.”) Technology seemed to be in Dan’s blood but at some point he took a different path and ended up in the clergy. His passion for technology and gadgets never left him. +Dan Cohen

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  • Carly Z

    Hm. I didn’t even know this existed…but I am probably the worst consumer possible from the standpoint of the NY Times. I usually get my NY Times articles through RSS, and only visit the website to read articles that catch my eye. I’ve found that there are more articles I’ve come across this way, since I get a succinct list of headlines and brief descriptions to skim, and it is less visually distracting than the main website. But I’m weird. :)