Look For Something And Find Something Else With Accidental News Explorer
The Accidental News Explorer ($1.99) by CreativeApplications.Net is a news app for your iPhone with a different perspective on reading the news - serendipity and chance encounters.
I love reading up on the news and other blogs. It's just a way for me to escape my worries and learn something new about what I like. But have you ever wondered what other news is out there that you may have missed because you don't know about it? The Accidental News Explorer (ANE) is here to fix that problem.
The interface of ANE is very minimalistic and simple, with a nice texture added that compliments the plain design. When the app is first launched, you'll see a single text field where you can type in a subject. By default, there is a random subject that is entered each time you go back to that screen. This can lead to plenty of interesting reading and perhaps even picking up a thing or two!
When you search for your topic, you'll get presented with a list of articles. These are fetched from the web. When you find an article you'd like to read, you can tap it to show a brief synopsis or excerpt from the article, and then the option to read the full article.
Individual articles will be presented in plain text thanks to Instapaper's Text Engine for the best text reading experience on mobile devices. There will be a link at the top and bottom of the article to view the full page with the in-app browser.
Whenever you view the synopsis screen, you will see two buttons along the bottom. One takes you to the Actions menu, and the other takes you to Related Topics. You can send the article to Instapaper, email or copy a link, or open in Safari from the Action Menu.
The Related Topics is where the fun comes from in ANE. This screen will show a bunch of related tags that are associated with the article that you were just reading and if you tap on any of them, you'll get another list of articles. The cycle of finding content and related content will continue.
With all those related topics, one is surely going to get lost in hours of reading material, right? What happens if you want to search for something specific? You can do it the long way, which is tapping back dozens of times, or you can use that white magnifying glass icon in the top right corner. From there, the cycle begins anew.
Currently, the only setting in ANE is to add an Instapaper account. There aren't options to adjust text size in the article lists or related topics or even support for Read It Later. Hopefully stuff like this (especially RIL) can be added in the future. The summary of an article can feel a bit short sometimes, or not give you enough. Perhaps more information can be displayed in the article summaries in an update.
Sometimes though, the choice of related topics aren't "chance encounters" but pretty straightforward. But still, I was able to find a good variety of topics to read about by using the app.
You may be quite surprised at the stuff that you may end up finding out because of it. Well worth the $2 admission price for those that love to discover news.
