Funnily enough, I'm also a subscriber of the FT! The app has the full newspaper ordered in the same way (Lex, The Big Read etc) and provides a pretty great experience for a digital consumer. It's not quite the same as having a hard copy in your hands, but for ease of access and portability - I can read it wherever I am in the world - it really is a fantastic product.
It's definitely my favorite app, as well. I download the paper before I leave in the morning, so when my train into work dives into the tunnels, I can catch up on the news before I even show up at my desk! (Much more productive than spending the first 30 minutes of my day at the nytimes website.)
This is why I started subscribing to newspaper apps through the Apple App Store. The apps are somewhat inferior, but the ability to unsubscribe and resubscribe easily are worth it to me.
Some out-loud thinking;
I wonder if you can apply this to news delivery in full. What I mean is, If I could submit a URL of the NYT business column and request that every morning, your app email me the mp3 file covering the whole column or just one article.
Essentially I can be listening to my morning paper on the go rather then reading it or needing a browser.
The FT app is based on html5. Initially, they had an app, but transitioned quickly to html5. Takes a wee bit longer to load, but barely notice that anymore. The experience otherwise is pretty much the same. And for what its worth, it's the best news app on my ipad.
Printful and Printful Mini were released on the App Store just a few hours ago. The former is a universal application, while the latter is iPhone-only.
Printful is a state of the art reading application for both iPhone and iPad. With its unique features, it allows you to read all the news, blogs, feeds and web pages you could wish for, whenever you have time and in the best available format for your device.
Supported features include:
* Subscriptions to numerous different sources. Virtually any newspaper or blog is supported. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds or receive links shared by your Facebook friends and by the people you follow at Twitter (more sources to come in future versions). It should be noted that it's not a RSS reader, it crawls the pages and extracts the articles.
* Organizing all your sources and pages in different folders.
Saving optimized versions of pages, removing any ads and distractions, so you can focus in the content.
Contents are kept in your device, so you can access them offline.
* Support for multimedia items, like images and videos.
* Send articles from your web browser to your iPhone or iPad with just one click.
* Data synchronization between all your devices without connecting them to a computer. Your subscriptions, lists and reading positions are always kept in sync over the Internet.
Promo codes are available on request. Just email me using "HN" in the subject and I'll send you a code privately (my email is in my profile).
I guess HN might also appreciate to know that this is a one-man project, and it took me around 2 months of work to write all the code.
Server side is written in Python. I'm using Tornado, lxml for HTML parsing, gearman for work queues and Postgres for storing data.
I'm considering porting this application to Android and OS X, but I'm not sure yet. Any kind of feedback about that will be highly appreciated ;).
We have created an exact replica of the app as a microsite so you can get a taste of it. I've shared the link to one of the articles on our app. You can scroll for more.
Now reading the news is as easy as swiping on Tinder ;)
I have been using Blendle nearly since the day they launched for reading Dutch newspapers. It is absolutely great: I can cherry-pick articles without subscribing to a newspaper, I don't have to shop around on different newspaper sites and they have this great feature where you can request a refund if an article is not what you expected quality-wise.
Also, they have this nice feature where you can register your newspaper subscription to get unlimited access in the Blendle webapp.
The only thing that I find lacking is an Android app - the webpage is sometimes slow on my nicely spec'ed ASUS tablet and I'd like to save longer articles for offline use.
You've done a really good job here. A news reader that lets me both rate news, theoretically learns my preferences over time, and lets me read the entire article without clicking more than once, is a serious package. (Why can't other readers get those things right?) My only problem is I'd prefer a native reader app to a web-based one, just because the major upside of using a reader is that it's constantly fetching and storing my feeds so there's no wait when I want to go read some news. I may check out your iPhone app though.
They're popular with people who take the subway. Think about it, you're sitting there for half an hour with no service. An app that pre-downloads all of a newspaper's stories is handy and easy to use.
We have created an exact replica of the app as a microsite so you can get a taste of it. I've shared the link to one of the articles on our app. You can scroll for more.
Now reading the news is as easy as swiping on Tinder ;)
I really like this. Offline browsing for a full 7 days, video and even a crossword puzzle? That's a pretty good bridge between Web-only reading and traditional newspapers. This app could really take off if they promote it right. At the very least, this would be awesome for an airplane or car trip.
Hopefully they roll out an iPhone/Blackberry/Whatever app too. Make it as mobile and easy to read as the real paper.
PressReader on mobile is pretty decent, there are tons of free sample papers and magazines available you can give a try to get a feel for it to see if it's your thing or not.
There's some annoying hiccups with the NYTimes replica edition that bug me, if you pull up the text-view of an article that's on the front page and continued elsewhere you'll often get just the continuation instead of the full article (I don't know who to blame here, it's not deal-breaking but it is annoying) - but in general scrolling and paging around feels good, the app always downloads content to your device so offline viewing is there 100% of the time and the interface is workable. One other little nuisance is you can't link your NYTimes replica edition account to your existing PressReader account, so you have to manage them separately and sign into both (which the app allows, fortunately).
Overall, would recommend, but give it a try before you commit to spending any money.
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