We’ve enabled a new feature called Apture on select New York Times blogs: Dot Earth, Economix and Diner’s Journal. Apture allows readers to dig deeper into a subject without ever leaving the page. In a blog post like this, when you see a hyperlink with a small icon next to it, click on that link. You’ll instantly see related videos, maps, documents, photos, New York Times topic pages and other content, all while staying on the same page.

One efficiency note: You can click anywhere on the body of the page to close the last Apture window opened.

We’d love to hear what you think about this feature. Please send us your thoughts by clicking on the “Feedback” link in the bottom-right corner of any Apture window or by e-mailing apture@nyt.com.

A few weeks ago, we released a still-unnamed article skimmer prototype. We told you our mission: to provide an online approximation of the pleasure of reading the Sunday Times. We asked you to tell us what you thought, and you obliged. Along with positive feedback, we received several suggestions and bug reports. We appreciate your enthusiasm and your candor, and we’re responding with an updated version of our article skimmer prototype.

One of the most common requests was to be able to Command-click or Control-click on links to open them in new tabs. The new version includes this capability.

Alternatively, many of you asked if you could open an article within the skimming interface itself. We’ve made this an option. You can now choose to open articles inside the application itself (the default), open articles in a new window/tab, or replace the app with the selected article. To change your setting, click the gear icon in the upper right corner.

You also suggested that we refine the technique for selecting an article with the keyboard. Here’s how it works in the new version: Press and hold the “A” key to show the selection interface. Use the arrow keys to move around, and press Return to view the highlighted article. To cancel, simply release the “A” key.

Finally, some of you asked about the iPhone experience. We’ve included a custom look that will appear only on your iPhone and tries to make the layout a little more manageable on the small screen. We also added the drag-scrolling gesture for moving between sections. This is a brand-new feature, and we’re still improving the performance. Drag-scrolling works on your regular computer, too.

Now for some goodies.

Zoomer

This one’s not actually new, but you may not have noticed it yet. If you hold the Shift key while mousing over a story, a detail view appears, letting you read the full content of a slide. This is useful if part of the content is cut off. Also, the text size is larger in the zoomer.

Lenses

The original version does not show specific dates or time-related information. This was intentional, as timelessness is part of the serendipity of discovering a new article and thus part of the relaxed Sunday experience we’re trying to provide. Still, there is value in knowing the freshness of a given story, so we looked for a creative solution.

To see what’s new, press and hold the “U” key. Articles published in the last thirty minutes will get a soft blue highlight. And while you’re holding that key, other commands will still work. So if you press and hold “U” to see what’s new, and then also press and hold “A” to select an article, the article selector will appear — while the new articles remain highlighted.

We call this a lens, and it’s an idea we’re looking to develop further. Got an idea for a handy lens? Tell us below in the comments.

More Content

Love our blogs? So do we. We’ve added a selection of blogs, such as The Lede, The Caucus, City Room, DealBook, Bits and many others. Be sure to check out The Times Traveler, which posts daily summaries of what was in the paper 100 years ago, with links to view the actual articles in our Times Machine.

Looking for stories on a particular person, place, issue, story line or concept? Try one of our thousands of Times Topics. We’ve included our most popular topics, as well as a few other selections, such as recipes, restaurants and bacon.

Schemes

Many of you said you loved the grid-style layout of our article skimmer, but others wanted to explore other options. So we’re introducing “schemes” that make it easy to change the layout. To try out a new look, click the new settings button in the upper right corner.

Schemes are very experimental and are starting points for further discussion; not all features work in every scheme.

Got an idea for a killer scheme? Did we miss your feature request? Not happy with a change? Ecstatic about a change? Let us know in the comments.

Check it out: http://prototype.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer/

On February 24, Apple released a public beta of Safari 4. Unfortunately, the Safari 4 beta conflicts with our Times Reader beta for Mac. As many of you have commented on already, Times Reader will stop working. The only solution at this time is to uninstall the Safari 4 beta.

We will not be providing a fix for this issue on the current version of Times Reader, because in a matter of weeks, we will be releasing an entirely new version of Times Reader. The new version will not only address this problem but will introduce a variety of new features. More details about that will come in a future post.

As always, please send us your feedback and suggestions at timesreader@nytimes.com.

Rob Larson
Vice President, Digital Production, NYTimes.com

Eight months after announcing the release of the NYTimes iPhone Application, we’re delighted to announce the release of version 2.0.

We started from scratch for version 2.0, rethinking every aspect of the application based on extensive user feedback from our first release. The result is a more stable application with a more intuitive interface. We’ve included several new tools to enhance your news reading experience, as well as extensive customization options.

If you loved our original NYTimes application, we’re sure you’ll love version 2.0. If you were less of a fan the first go-round, we invite you to try it again and share your thoughts.

As always, our iPhone team welcomes your suggestions and opinions. Contact us directly at iphone@nytimes.com.

The shape of community has changed–much it virtual instead of actual — but the goal of bringing people together has not. With our recent launch of The Local blogs in Maplewood, N.J., (with coverage of Millburn and South Orange, too) and Fort Greene and Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, we combine the traditional realm, the neighborhood, with the present-day medium, the Web.

In the launch post for The Local in Maplewood, Tina Kelley explains the place and purpose of the blog:

This is not a we-talk-at-you-and-you-listen kind of site. The Local will be built and maintained with your help, contributions, advice, admonitions, creations, words and pictures. And, yes, I suspect with your heckling, too.

Send in your child’s artwork to be featured in “the fridge,” submit happenings like engagements and events, and report neighborhood issues, all to your friendly neighborhood blog.

As part of NYTimes.com’s Business expansion, we present its newest sub-section, Energy & Environment. In addition to its centerpiece, the Green Inc. blog, Energy & Environment includes:

-Curated topic pages about things like Biofuels
-A Markets module featuring three dynamic indexes that track the energy industry
-A video series about the section editor Tom Zeller’s efforts to “greenify” his home upstate
-Exclusive–and free–hosted content from two previously subscription-only sources, Greenwire and Climatewire

Here at The Times, we often hear a common story of usage from our customers: Reading the Sunday Times, spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch. For many of our customers, this ritual is fundamental to their enjoyment of the weekend, and its absence would be jolting.

With this in mind, we present an as-yet-unnamed article skimmer. Think of it as an attempt to provide the Sunday Times experience anytime. Of course, there are parts we can’t replicate: the satisfying crinkle of the paper; the circular stain of your coffee; the smell of newsprint.

Instead, our focus was on the fundamentals of the experience. It is empowering to spread so much information out on a table, so we spread as many stories as we can fit into the space of your screen. It is easier and more relaxing to scan a surface of information than flip through a stack, so information is laid out in a rigid two-dimensional grid. The sections do not flip into place; instead, they slide up and down. If you want to imagine the whole of the content as a giant uncut scroll of paper, don’t let us stop you.

Article Skimmer

We’re also geeks, so there are plenty of keyboard commands for the efficiency lovers. The space bar takes you down a section, and shift-space brings you back up. Arrow keys do the same. You can navigate sections by holding down the “s” key (s for section), typing the number that appears, and releasing the “s” key. Same goes for articles, but with the “a” key (a for article). If you need a reminder, just click the “?” in the upper right corner.

Please note: Sunday Browsing is not compatible with Internet Explorer 6, but is compatible with Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

We want you to scan sections visually, zeroing in on what interests you. Instead of displaying dates, articles gradually fade as they get older. And you can locate the newest articles with a quick glance.

We hope the result is a little taste of Sunday relaxation, whenever you need it.

http://prototype.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer

With the recent release of IE8 RC1, we’ve been getting excited about one of the interesting new features of Microsoft’s newest browser: Web Slices. Web Slices are similar to “live bookmarks” — a bookmark that is periodically updated with new information — with a useful twist: Web Slices give you the option of displaying a preview window when clicked. This preview fly-out gives you at-a-glance access to the information that was updated on the bookmarked URL. Web Slices are automatically discovered by IE8 as you browse to a page that contains them. A special green icon () appears in one of IE8’s toolbars to alert you to the presence of Web Slices on the current page. Installation is as simple as selecting the Web Slice to install from the drop-down, and confirming that you want to add the Web Slice to your Favorites toolbar.
Read more…

The economy is on everyone’s mind, but even more so is how the latest economic news affects our money. To guide you through the often confusing world of personal finance, we’ve revamped the Your Money section. New features include:

A widget, according to Wikipedia, “is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.” For those of us non-techies who question the language in which that description was written, we offer a simpler explanation: “A widget is a convenient tool that allows you to add continuously updated online content to your personal Web site, blog, social-network or search engine home page.”

That’s how we describe a widget on our new Times Widgets product, where you can easily create your own widgets from NYTimes.com content. It really is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

To the New Yorkers who are supposed to know everything, quick, who represents your household in the New York City Council? How about the U.S. House of Representatives?

For the classically know-it-all New Yorkers who sometimes don’t know it all, we bring you Represent, in beta. Enter your street address and zip code, then hit Go. The following page displays a chart of your districts, the person who represents you and in what political body they represent you; Google maps of each district; and a list of articles in which your representatives have recently appeared. We know, you knew this all already.

To hear the thoughts, ideas and work behind Represent, read what our developers have to say on Open.

Sometimes we all get a little obsessed, particularly with our TV shows. In the late ’90s, “Seinfeld” shaped more than a few New Yorker identities, and more recently, we witnessed lengthy water-cooler recaps of old-school “Mad Men”. This sort of undying loyalty to our favorite shows and characters (hello, “The Office”) was part of the inspiration for our newly debuted 1,000+ TV show pages, with many more to come.

If you regularly cap off your weekend with a bit of “Desperate Housewives,” for instance, we’ve got what you’re looking for. Notice the plethora of information in every one: cast, credit and awards; an Episode Guide; Readers’ Ratings, including for individual episodes; and a compilation of related articles and reviews.

To start obsessing, visit the Television section and enter your show of choice into the search box at the top of the page.

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, it’s the Personal Tech Holiday Buying Guide.

As our piece du jour, there’s the Pogue-o-matic, virtually hosted by our personal technology columnist, David Pogue. David’s virtual self walks you through four product categories: cameras, camcorders, smartphones and TVs. Once inside a category, choose the requirements for your desired product and then print or e-mail the resulting suggestions, or send them to your mobile phone.

While a virtual David Pogue is plenty to handle, that’s not all. There’s Gadgetwise, a new blog that helps you navigate your way through personal technology, and of course, the actual guides, for the young, the road warrior, the part-time athlete and the TV fan.

Thanksgiving is upon us, and you’re thinking of cooking up something a little different (or perhaps more traditional). Enter the beta version of our Holiday Recipe Search, found at the top of the Dining & Wine section. Browse our Thanksgiving-related recipes by entering a word into the search box or simply clicking on one of the links below “Browse Thanksgiving Recipes.” Perhaps this is the year you’ll undertake that deep-fried turkey.

Next up, recipes for the December holidays.

You’ve probably noticed, or you may be discovering it for the first time: we have video, lots of it, and it just went under a facelift. Now our videos are easier to find and sharable, with sharper, high-quality images.

Our Video Library is sortable by section, with additional categories that include Latest Video Reports and Editors’ Choice, and you can e-mail or share your favorites on social networks like Facebook. Then there’s a module that sorts by the latest and most-viewed videos. Watch them in full-screen mode with a simple click, from the Video Library or any section front where a video appears, like Travel.

All the news that fit to click? All the news that’s fit to play.