NY Times Article Skimmer

If you are like me and can't stand the layout of the NY Times website because it extremely cluttered, uses a zillion different layouts, requires lots of scrolling, and generally makes it hard to scan through lots of articles quickly, you should checkout the new NY Times Article Skimmer.

The Skimmer has a uniform layout with a title and short description for each article and has the ability to go from section to section by just hitting the space bar. It makes it really easy to look over all the articles in the paper quickly.

It is pretty cool, but it would be even better if they made 3 changes.

First, they should ditch the boxes and have all the articles in one vertical column, ala Digg. This boxes layout might work well with a widescreen monitor (though I think a 2 columns setup would work better for these folks), but with my narrowscreen setup it sucks as your eyes are constantly going down rather than across.

Second, they should take another page out of Digg's playbook, and allow sorting of each section by most emailed over the last 1, 7 and 30 days. I don't really care which articles the editors thought were most important and would rather see which readers preferred.

Third, I wish you could bookmark subpages (like Most Emailed) and when you click on a link then hit the back button, that you would return to that subpage rather than the front page. I like the fact that you can hit the space bar to view a new page, but if using that javascript magic negates the ability to get to subpages directly then I think it should be ditched.

Even with these issues it is definitely worth checking out.

via First Look Blog via LifeHacker