Up until recently, it used to be that news junkies like yours trulls diligently put every conceivable news app on their Home screens in order to make sure they kept tabs on the latest news as it happened. As an unintended consequence (or was it?), this has led to information overload which in turn gave birth to apps like Yahoo’s excellent News Digest (free in the App Store) and Gist by Michael Mamiye.
Both of these intelligently summarize news articles so you can consume key takeaways in the shortest amount of time.
Gist for iPhone, $1.99 in the App Store, is especially interesting due to its gorgeous and sharp user interface and a clever algorithm that can summarize most articles into approximately five bullet points – that’s why the iDownloadBlog team put it on the list of 10 Best News Apps of 2013.
Following up on its mid-December debut, the developer this morning issued a major 2.0 update bringing out a host of goodies, such as a more robust implementation of the summarization technology, rich Pocket support and lots more…
For starters, Gist now supports iOS 7’s system-wide Dynamic Type size so if you go to iOS Settings > General > Text Size and set your preferred reading size, Gist will now honor your choice and automatically adapt itself to the chosen text size.
Next up, Gist 2.0 fully supports Pocket so you can easily view, summarize, add, delete, favorite and archive Pocket articles, right within Gist (should you prefer Instapaper, saving to that is now supported, too).
You’ll also notice a new tab-based navigation.
Your Recent Searches button has been moved to the search bar, there’s a slightly reduced speech rate for Regular setting and you can now open full articles directly form the main screen, by swiping on the article.Â
What else?
Gist can now open your articles in Safari or Chrome – the choice is yours.
There’s a new summary view for “dramatically easier reading” and the app can now read a short excerpt of an article while you’re waiting for it to summarize.
Last but not least, if you’re familiar with URL Schemes (MacStories has an excellent tutorial on that), Gist now lets you set up workflows to communicate with other apps.
Gist 2.0 for the iPhone and iPod touch is $1.99 in the App Store.
Have you tried Gist yet and if so, what did you think of it?