There are a lot of news readers for the iPhone to keep up on the latest news from your choice of info providing sites. The reader provides a headline and a short that the article provided for them. The short text is usually the first line or two of the article or a teaser to get your to tap the ‘read more’.
An app that is providing a different view of Web site articles is Summly. The app shortens a Web site’s post to the core of the article. This is not text provided by the site, the app does some crazy science to deliver the post in a quick view. Just put in a site URL and you quickly get what your interested in without all of the extra words.
If the URL is going to a page with many posts, Summly only handles the top most article. This is great if your using Summly to get the newest news/posts. Entering a more specific URL will result in a summary of that single article.
Any Web page article reduced to the core information can easily be shared. The Summly share button in the upper right corner allows for emailing the Summly summary or link directly to the article. Being able to copy the summary to paste in a text I’m working on is proving to be handy.
At the bottom of each Summly conversion page is the keywords associated with the article. Tap one to be taken to a search page giving you a list of Web site articles also using that keyword.
Tap one of the article short-cuts or putting in a specific article url and you get just that post’s real meaning points. In just one iPhone screen, you get the core information that would normally require you scroll through many screens of content.
If you want to see the ‘long’ version of the article, tap the headline to go to a view of the actual Web page. Do this from time-to-time just to see how good Summly really is at showing you ‘just the facts’.
Summly keep the history of the sites (via ‘Recent’ in the lower left corner) you visit down to the level of the individual articles for later reference. Tap any to go to the summary. Removal from the list is through the ‘Edit’ button in the upper right corner.