I have many friends—lawyers and non-lawyers—who love NPR. Whether you are a casual listener like me or a dedicated listener of great NPR shows like Morning Edition, Car Talk or Wait Wait..Don’t Tell me, there is a lot to love in the new NPR News app.
Upon launch, the app presents you with a list of news stories. Tap any story to read the text of a story and, for those stories with an audio icon, you can listen to the associated NPR story. I love NPR on the radio when the story is one that interests me, but one of my gripes with NPR is that the stories are so detailed and in-depth that if the topic doesn’t interest me, I need to wait a while for the next story. Because this app lets you pick and choose just the stories that interest you, you get to hear only the good stuff. You can either listen immediately by tapping the “Listen Now” button or you can “Add to Playlist” to build up a list of stories before you start listening.
If you are interested in listening to a particular program, tap the Programs button and you can choose from a list of NPR programs. If one of the programs is playing live on any NPR station in the country, you can even listen to a live stream. For older shows you can listen to an archived version.
When you are listening to a show, you will see a stop button and a progress bar at the bottom. Unfortunately, once you stop a podcast, you cannot resume from the same point. In other words, it is a stop button, not a pause button. You also cannot scrub through a program to fast forward through it, although an NPR representative told TUAW that scrubbing is coming in the next update, version 1.1.
As noted in the picture further up, when you tap the Programs tab you can either list All Programs or see a list of stories organized by topic. For example, here I am looking at the Technology stories and then choosing one to play:
There is also a Stations button at the bottom that allows you to select any NPR station in the country and listen to a live stream or on demand programs. The NPR station here in New Orleans is WWNO, which you can choose by tapping the state and then city, but the app also lets you find a station close to a zip code or use the iPhone’s GPS to quickly find the nearest station. I can even listen to the WWNO HD radio streams, something I cannot do in my car which lacks an HD radio.
If you want to see a video demo of the NPR app, Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon prepared this YouTube video:
For a long time now, you have been able to subscribe to NPR shows via iTunes and get the programs on your iPhone that way. But having a dedicated NPR app that is updated throughout the day and which can stream live content makes it so much easier to find something worth listening to when you are out and about with your iPhone.
If you want to learn more about how the app came about, click here for a post on the NPR website called “The Making of the NPR News iPhone App.” The end of that story says that later this week, a new post will go up with the scoop on what is coming in the next update to the app. The NPR app is already great, and will only get better with updates. If you enjoy NPR news, get this app.
Click here to get NPR News (free): 