NPR for iPad

Apart from the arguably necessary ads, which include screen-filling images and speaker-absorbing audio, it’s easy to be impressed with NPR for iPad(Free), the official application of National Public Radio. NPR provides three scrolling streams of content: “news,” “arts & life,” and “music,” the latter one with a guaranteed mix of audio and text content, and the former two with text and possibly audio as well. Click on any speaker icon and you can listen to the network’s professionally developed and almost invariably smart combinations of narrative and music; select a story and you get a scrollable, readable text article with a photograph and sharing links out to Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail.

You can also build saved playlists of audio you want to hear—including on-demand content from individual NPR programs and live stations—which continue to play for as long as you’re within the application, which could easily be hours given that the app also includes a topics browser that includes access to numerous other articles that aren’t featured on the main page. Apart from video, which is absent in the NPR app, there’s a ton to read, see, and hear here; it’s a highly compelling app that lacks only for the big main page, search feature, broader archives, and podcast content of the NPR web page.

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