What you need to know
- The New York Times has launched its own widget.
- The widget will show breaking news that will be updated every 15 minutes.
- It can also only show one headline for those with accessibility needs.
In a blog post, the New York Times has announced that it is launching its own widget for iOS 14 on the iPhone. The publication says that the widget will feature two headlines that will update automatically as new stories are published throughout each day.
This new widget will allow readers to quickly catch up on the most important news of the moment. Readers who install the widget to the home screen of an iPhone or iPad running iOS 14 or later will see two headlines that will refresh as new content is published.
The idea of adding a widget to the app was apparently started by a small group of engineers at the company who took it on as a passion project when Apple had announced widgets for iOS back at WWDC in June.
In the weeks leading up to The Times's annual Maker Week in July, Mark Murray, an iOS engineer, started generating excitement for the widget and Taylor Poulos, a product designer, prototyped designs. Pretty soon, a cross-functional group of people from the newsroom, design, product and data had teamed up to build a widget that matched our ambitions to reader and product needs.
The team also designed the widget to understand the accessibility needs of the user and can adjust to only show one headline so that the widget is easier to read.
Headlines are most informative when they can be read in full, yet our first prototype truncated headlines that were too long. This certainly didn't meet our readers' needs. Due to time constraints — Maker Week is only five days — we didn't want to build a new API, so we instead worked with our existing publishing pipeline. The widget now scales to a single headline based on the accessibility settings of a device, or the specific ranking of our newsroom editors.
To check out the new New York Times widget, you can download the New York Times app from the App Store for free.
