After launching its excellent news summarization app, News Digest, in the App Store back in January 2014, the Internet pioneer Yahoo on Friday refreshed the application with a native user interface on iPads and three new iPad-specific features.
First up, there’s a brand new weekly video show available by Katie Couric. You’ll recall that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently hired the former “The Today Show” host as a global news anchor for Yahoo News.
Couric’s show is premiering every Sunday to walk you through a significant story from the week before and give you “key context to get you in the know”. More on an extra news category and new alert timings right after the break.
Yahoo says the new version of News Digest also offers digest timings (news digests are delivered twice a day) and an extra news categories called Sections with new topics like Politics, Sports, Entertainment and Technology.
Yahoo says you can now choose anytime between 6am to 10am for your morning digest and 5pm to 9pm for your evening digest.
Note that Sections are available in the US edition and coming to other countries soon. The animated GIF below shows the new Sections.
Yahoo 1.5 changelog:
- We are excited to bring Digest to iPad! As well as a beautifully designed experience, enjoy brand new features on iPad such as:
- A new, weekly Katie Couric video show
- Extra News Categories called Sections
- Customization of Digest timings
Though initially delivering only US/UK specific news, back in May the app started serving news stories globally, with both international and Canadian editions of the Digest now available.
For those unfamiliar with it, Yahoo News Digest is based on a summarization technology created by then 15-year-old UK college student Nick D’Aloisio.
Yahoo was so impressed by his work they purchased his startup Summly outright in March of last year for a cool $30 million, bringing D’Aloisio on board to help integrate Summly tech into Yahoo’s services.
Now universal, the 15.4-megabyte Yahoo News Digest requires iOS 7.0 or later.
[App Store via Yahoo Blog]