TheGlassLog: #Glassware review: The New York Times for #Glass is kind of pointless

What you see when the New York Times delivers “content” to Glass.

One of the first services* to become available and officially sanctioned by Google was the New York Times service for Glass. I get their daily headlines email so I thought this would be great. I’d get the headlines throughout the day as the stories broke rather than having to wait until the next morning, right? Well, not so much. In fact, it’s almost like the New York Times service for Glass is a big tease.



You enable the New York Times service just like any other Google-sanctioned service: by going to your myglass page and flipping the “enable” “switch.” Before you know it, you’ll see a card like the one above appear on your Glass. The one above is more like a book than a card (see this previous TheGlassLog post for more). This is mainly because it has more “cards” inside of it. Each photo thumbnail image you see above represents a story included inside the book.

To access the included stories, tap on the touchpad once while viewing the above card. Then you’ll see a card for the first included story, like this, for example:

This is what a story card looks like. Savor it. The New York Times does not give you much more content than this.

You’ll be able to swipe forward and backward to navigate through the included story cards. However, there are usually only one or two to navigate through and they are almost never “breaking stories” which makes me wonder why I need them delivered directly to my eyeball.

So, that’s pretty much it. The only other thing you can do at this point is tap on the touchpad again to get the option to “Read aloud” the article:

Once you see that, another tap results in you hearing this:

Yep, that’s right. That’s it. You can’t do anything else, either. You can’t tap again to read the whole article or have the whole thing read to you. I am honestly not sure what the point of this is. You can’t forward it to yourself (as is possible with the near perfect but semi-hobbled Glass Feeds service), you can’t bookmark it or even share it with anyone. It’s like we’ve gone back in time and this is one of those news briefs we used to get during commercial breaks, right before the show came back on.

But it’s the 21st century and we’re used to clicking on things to get further information, which you can’t do here. So, in general, the New York Times service for Glass really seems utterly useless to me. Sorry if that seems harsh, but what am I supposed to do with a photo and couple of sentences of news?

In Conclusion

So, you can see why the NYT service is just a big tease. It tempts us with its headlines but gives us no way to get at them without sufficient effort.

Thanks so much for reading TheGlassLog at thepete.com! Next time I’ll review the CNN service for Glass! Please check back tomorrow or subscribe to my blog’s rss feed or get my blog in your inbox!

Read past posts in TheGlassLog!

*Please remember, I don’t refer to Glass “apps” but call them services, instead. Unless I am referring to what are called “native apps,” which are installed and run locally, on Glass, itself. I have not written about native apps, just yet. What Google is calling an “app” runs on a server someplace. I also refer to a “bookshelf” rather than calling it a “stream” when I refer to where you find all of your content on Glass. Read more here.

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