The New York Times released the 2.0 version of its popular free iPhone app today and it’s one you’ll want to be sure to grab. The app now offers extensive support for offline reading, making it one of the easiest ways to catch up with the news on a plane.
The app store hasn’t updated yet so you’ll have to grab it and manually update the app. Any stories you load with a web connection turned on will be saved automatically for offline reading. It’s easy to customize the interface to highlight your favorite sections of the publication and we expect to be thankful for this app on our next flight.
ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner with the New York Times but we’re just writing about the new iPhone app because we think it’s cool. We’re not afraid to say that we find the ad for movie listings at the bottom of every page really annoying.
If we had any suggestions they would be to put that movie ad in a more appropriate place and perhaps to include links to some of the several very interesting implementations of the new Times APIs, like this awesome elastic list article browser.
Check out the “browse by photos” feature, too. It’s an all around good iPhone app, something we expect other publications to learn from. Offline readers will enjoy Instapaper’s iPhone app as well, but that requires users to designate articles for reading from a regular web interface. Sometimes you’re in a rush and the new Times app looks like it will deliver.
