Revision of Mobile News Design: Summarizing Principle
Smartphone era actively flows, from time to time presenting interesting thing. The exclusive trend web developers ought to know and take into consideration is applications intended to shorten the news making understandable intelligence summaries. They have been called news bites.
Massive internet gave an access to the news in quite suitable way: they are free, easy-to-find, numerous. The smartphones gave an access to internet from anywhere. Connecting these two theses we would have a growing popularity of news apps. But why news bites? I suppose it’s just a natural evolution of news services for smartphones – and it have few concrete reasons. First of all, it’s dictated by the configuration of the smartphones: small screen is not so comfortable for reading large blocks of text.
The other convenience is you may quickly browse the news, finding exactly what is needed basing on clear summaries. Again – it’s especially useful for navigation based on the specific touch-screen interaction of smartphones.
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The most appropriate candidate for the role of news bites forerunner I assume to be Circa. This tool works well for news managing. Circa transforms articles into a list of their main ideas and facts, also quotes. Nevertheless, this news app doesn’t exploit fully automatic algorithm to slice texts into meaningful chunks, so it can be considered to be the previous generation. Indeed, programs stride ahead to communist future, where every process would be robotized.
Official website
Circa on iTunes
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The first analogue of true news bite is Summly. The app is launched on November 1, 2012 by Nick D’Aloisio, who is sometimes granted as an Internet boy genius. Well, I think there is no need to pay attention on this marketing trick, but the application is really great.
A combination of natural language processing and “rocket science” permits choosing only the most important information. This task is facilitated by competent topic separation.
The app is aimed to free you from scrolling, while you’re checking the summarized article. If you are interested in the article, there is an option to get more extended version or further a full edition. News can be easily shared through social media.
The interface is pretty designed in minimalist style. Besides, the application was developed exactly for smartphone usage, so navigation is totally handy. By the way, talking about design: the look of Summly website is quite fashionable (according to web design fashion, of course). Also, as we can see from a notice on the website, developers are preparing to release Summly for Android soon.
Official website
Summly on iTunes
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Another proper example of software using news bites principle is application with an unusual name Wavii. To my opinion, this program took a lot from social media concept and I suppose it to be the most remarkable Wavii’s feature, which strongly differentiate it from Summly. The main point is that you can discuss recent news appearing in your feed with your friends. The app also has categorisation: a user can follow topics like accounts on Twitter.
Official website
Wavii on iTunes
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The tendency is rather fresh, therefore no-one can state for sure what turnabouts we should expect. Anyway, news bites confidently conquers mass media app sphere. That’s why it seems to me that companies providing with news would have to pay attention on this trend in the near future.
If you have to add anything else to the topic, you are welcome to express your opinion in the comments below.
About the author:
Art Rivera: Deeply interested in everything connected with Internet, I sincerely suppose the web is the only future reality for the humanity through its inevitable involving into every part of human life. I’m not a great fan of cyberpunk concept, but the world is keeping that certain direction of total connectedness. And of course there should be someone, who can write the history, who would describe and analyze and enter in the record all notable changes and tendencies on the web. Hello, it’s me.
