All the news that was fit to print

Michael Dain, Thursday, May 22, 2008 @ 2:41 pm

The New York Times has unveiled an archival service called Times Machine which archives the past 100 years of the newspaper of record. Along with the benefit of seeing ads for trusses, we see a very sophisticated and robust interface using HTML + CSS + Javascript of a very easy way to scan large amounts of printed text. There have been so many of these kind of apps, almost always using Flash with proprietary back end processing, it's refreshing to see these sorts of interfaces with the code all public and easy to steal learn from.

In this case, the clever interaction design (and a hurdle for HTML) is to pair the actual article image (spanning multiple columns) with the text summary. The implementation makes scanning the paper a breeze and has a great visual clue of highlighting the image and overlaying the summary text. I'm delving into the markup to see how they managed to dynamically pair the images with the representative text, and seeing what other magic is under the hood.

Another nice feature was the rotating 'share' button, which takes care of not prominently promoting digg or reddit, but subtly reminding users that if they like to vote, here's where to do it. The only bad feature is that this is for paying customers only, but NYT has made free its online articles, hopefully in time this will follow suit, the days of microfilm readers may be numbered.

user experience design

Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   Neat find. I’m always glad when I see big companies using open technologies to accomplish their needs. Although I feel bad for the people that had to read through all the articles and write summaries.

   Comment by T.J., Friday, May 23, 2008 @ 2:17 pm

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