NPR has launched a new version of its mobile radio app for Google Android. NPR News 2.0 has a new user interface, support for favorite stations, additional programs, and the whole thing just feels a little smoother to use. But one of the biggest changes is that you can now listen to an entire episode of a recent radio show without having to queue up segments one at a time.

You can still listen to radio stories one at a time, browsing by top stories or topic. But when you want to listen to a specific show such as Morning Edition, Fresh Air, RadioLab, or All Things Considered, you’ll find a new “Add all to playlist” button at the top of the screen.

NPR News 2.0 is available as a free download from the Android Market.

via reddit

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NPR has released an updated version of its app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. NPR News 3.0 brings a number of improvements, including support for the retina displays on the iPhone 4 and new iPod touch, support for the taskbar audio player controls when listening in the background, and the ability to refresh the story list by pulling down on the screen.

But the biggest change is that you can finally search the NPR archive from the app, using the little search icon located next to Newscast in the menu bar.

NPR News 3.0 also lets you swipe left or right to flip between stories in the News and Search sections (but not yet in Programs, so you can’t swipe between Morning Edition or All Things Considered segments, for instance.”

Overall, the new NPR News app is a big improvement over the old version — although the app crashed on me the first few times I tried to tap on a story. Hopefully version 3.0.1 will fix any stability issues.

Still, the price is right. NPR News 3.0 is available as a free download from the App Store.

You can check out a few more screenshots after the break.

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NPR has released the source code for its Android app. For now, that won’t mean much to most users. The app still lets you listen to reports from NPR programs and fine live streams from local NPR member stations. It was available as a free download yesterday and it’s still free today.

But NPR is hoping that by opening up the source code to the public, the app can grow in new and interesting ways.

What I didn’t realize until today was that a single NPR fan at Google was almost single-handedly responsible for building the original NPR Android app. He did it in his free time. NPR is hoping that contributions from other independent developers can make the app more useful, attractive, or just more interesting.

NPR is also taking suggestions for the app from Android users who don’t know how to code. You can reach out to the organization through its blog or Twitter account.

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