NYT app all about reading. Really?

Steve Meyers:

Last summer, back when the iPad existed only in Apple R&D and in whispers about some kind of revolutionary tablet computer, the Times did some research on how people use its iPhone app.

One of the key findings, Brook said, was that “people loved reading on the device,” often opting to read stories on their iPhones rather than their computers.

Well, they could have fooled me. The typography of the NYT app is simply atrocious—even more so when you think that it comes from an institution that has 150 years of typographical know-how.

Typography is essential in an application that is built for reading; even though the iPad’s own typographical capabilities leave something to be desired (a major mistake on Apple’s part, in my opinion), the NYT app is particularly poor in this respect: the combination of font size and colour make Georgia look fuzzy—almost as though someone had run a blur filter on it; the app has no vertical flow to speak of, and for some inexplicable reason, the last line of text in a paragraph has a higher line height than its predecessors.

To use a scientific term, yuck.