The Netflow

Review of Free iPhone News Apps, Part 1

As an Irish person, who tends to be interested in home and worldwide news, the iPhone, and more specifically some iPhone applications, are indispensible. Especially if they’re free… I know there are a large number of paid news apps available but free is always better . So looking at the top 50 news apps listed by apple in the Irish app store, I decided to compare a good selection of them(15) on a couple of important factors. Things like application design, ease of use, reliability and speed(3G), will be important, but not the only things taken into account. And while its not my job, or right really, to judge what news you read – I will also be throwing quality of articles into the mix – though in some cases this is going to be pretty bad. But then again, if you like that kind of news feel free to ignore my take on that part of the application. I didn’t rank the list in any particular order but left it in the order that I found them on the app store.

Daily Star News App

On first looks this app seems to be very basic. And after using it for a bit, it doesn’t really get any better. The design is quite simple, and the interface is quite underwhelming. Though that said – its easy to get where you need to go and the application is also fast to load and to move between articles.  There also doesn’t seem to be any way to refresh the current stories manually – You have to go into a story and then come back out again. Not ideal but not a show stopper. The news is English focused like the paper but if you like the Irish print version(with the token Irish stories) you may like this application as well.

They’ve kept the headlines a bit short but there’s an image with every story which is always good. The article length is often very short though. There’s also isn’t a lot of choice… you get News, Gossip, Babes, and Sport. That’s it… There’s also an information button for more information about the company that made the app… not very professional but people need publicity I suppose. I’ve also noticed some weird bugs… If you click to go into an article the toolbar at the bottom changed to a loading icon(left) and a refresh button(right). Pressing that refresh button takes you straight to the Babes section… A pleasant surprise but a surprise indeed. Interface buttons should always do what you think they will… and the refresh button is one of the best well known symbols around. Changing what it does in your application will only confuse people. (Although in this case I can hardly say I was upset…)

NYTimes News App

This application from the New York Times is one of the first news applications that I ever used. I also have previously recommended because it is very good. The quality of the writing seems to be excellent and some of the editorial pieces have had me reading for whole commutes. The interfaces is very nice, and very detailed. You have a huge amount of choice if you need it, but the latest news is right there in front of you straight away. The popular stories are also just one click away. The rest of the categories are only 2. Its an excellent interface and one that lets you get where you need to. Its also one that iPhone, iPod users will be used to as its very similar to how you get to podcasts for example from the music app. It’s good to see they’ve done some research.

There are a few nice features within the articles too – the top and bottom toolbars visible in the second screenshot, disappear when you start scrolling through the article. It takes the interface out of the way while you’re reading. Nice. And its easy to get it back – one click on the article and they pop back. Also when you read all the way down to the bottom of the article it knows when you’ve reached the bottom and it pops back. The ability to resize the text is there too – which is important as I find that the default text size is much too big. Back on the homepage the refresh button does what you expect of it, and articles seem to be fairly regularly uploaded.

Although this app has very few problems(and many positives), it does have one or two… – its quite slow, and after a bit of use the app crashed a few times – not a huge deal but hopefully would be resolved in later releases.

On a side note, this is also the only application to use right aligned thumbnails for the articles… hmmm.

Sky News

One of my favourite of the newer news apps that I’ve downloaded, this app has a lot going for it. The interface is simple enough, but shows you a lot of information straight away. As soon as you load the application you get the 6 top stories straight away. A feat only matched by one other application in this list. However, there does seem to be a little ad bar that opens down at the bottom but I can’t work out when it opens – it seems to be entirely random. The application is fully featured, and a lot of the stories also have video included and its easy to see which ones. The app is reasonably fast to load, with a nice little headline by headline loading mechanism. 

 

If I could give out about one thing, however, is that the article functionality is very basic. There’s no resizing of text, and no landscape view. Also, oddly, there’s no ability to share that interesting news story that you’ve just come across. This is surprising as almost every other app here lets you email, or twitter a link to the story.

One interesting part of this application is the “Your Report” section. I can see this having many benefits for Sky News as it enables you to send them news of an event that you might be witnessing! I can see this being a big thing – especially with the proliferation of iPhones around these days.

Time Mobile

There are a few Time magazine subscribers in my family and I came across this app advertised at the back of the magazine so a good while ago I checked it out. The first time I loaded it I was nicely surprised by the design of the interface, nice big pictures with a coverflow-like ability to flick across from one story to the next. However, for those of you without perfect 3G coverage there is also the ability to press a button in the top right had corner and to change it to a list view that some people might be more comfortable with. Apart from the default coverflow-like picture interface the rest of the interface is very similar to a lot of the other major news site apps. As I talk about in the conclusion later – this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

 

The article pages have a few nice features too – you are able to zoom in on the article and you can also change the font size. However the stand out very nice feature is in the bottom left corner of the article pages – the ability to turn off the accelerometer so that it doesn’t accidently shift to landscape view in the middle of you reading something! I absolutely loved this, and found myself looking for this feature in every other IPhone application I use! Back to the app though the news and editorials tend to be of good quality and if you’re used to the magazine or the website then you should be well looked after by this application.

ITN News

The ITN iphone application is one of a couple of applications on this list that provides Videos as well as more traditional text based news. And it has to be said that it does it very well. It’s very easy to see which story have associated videos attached, with a small “v” in the thumbnail. Once in the article and the quality is pretty good. The ads at athe top maybe take up a bit too much room but with excellent images and video this more than makes up for it. 

Within the articles it’s actually a little confusing where the videos are – until you click around a bit. Up in the Nav bar, you’ve got a copuple of buttons – Headlines(essentially the back button), Share and Videos.

This Videos button display a list of the associated videos and gives you the ability to play them. The loading of the videos is pretty quick and the quality pretty good.

The Share button gives you the ability to email and twitter a link to the article, however that sharing window that pops up is a bit weird. The cancel button doesn’t seem to work, and the others seem to take a long time to open. That could just be my phone though

Msnbc.com

The interface on this iPhone application caught me by surprise. The first, and I must say only, genuinely unique design out of this entire list comes from a news site that is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC. They integrated their logo (or maybe took inspiration from it) and turned it into a slick circular interface that is very nice to look at. Its also easy to use. When you click on one of the topics you’re taken through to a page that on first using is a little off-putting. The news itself flows by from the top downwards. This caught me out until I realised what it was doing. There is a pause button down at the bottom of the screen and I hit that as soon as I could!

The application is nicely fully featured and has literally hundreds of articles and blogs to read. They’ve also congregated all of their various twitter feeds under the twitter button. Once in there you can choose from any of their twitter accounts to see their recent updates. A nice feature indeed, as you can check out the feeds all in one place first before you decide to follow them later! I like this application a lot, from the Zumobi Network which seem to do a number of other nice applications.

Unfortunately, its not all rosy in the garden. To read the full articles, takes too many clicks and also loads the Msnbc webpage within a frame. If you just want the first half of the article you don’t have to go further but if you want to read the whole thing you must load the website. This website can be slow to load and kind of negates the data saving from using the application. I don’t understand this unless the object of the app is to get more visitors to their website? And maybe this would be acceptable if it didn’t have ads in the application, but it does – so you get ads in both places. Not ideal, but if you just want to do some casual news reading with a very nice interface then this application will suit you.

The Munster

The only free Irish web app in the top 50 listed in the Irish App Store, the Munster Express’s News iPhone app was a pleasantly surprisingly good application. This, I have to say caught me by surprise. I didn’t expect a regional Irish news paper to be able to produce such an app. And even if that does say more about me then it really should have, I then thought about it for a little while and I realized that of course it was possible. Ireland has an excellent community of developers who are easily capable of producing such an application. However why don’t we see more of this? The regional paper in my area – the Leinster Leader – does not have any iPhone app. But on to the application!

The application itself is pretty good. The number of articles on the main page is nice, as it allows you to scan headlines very quickly and easily. Especially when a brief excerpt is included. The application is pretty basic looking, but I suppose its better to stick to the default Apple styling than do some messy job yourself.

The news stories tend to be provincial but that’s exactly what you need from this type of application. If you’re from the south of Ireland and live away from home this is perfect to keep up to date.

Couple of weird things going on with the ads currently used by the app but I cant see that affecting you’re overall use of this application. The app is on the basic side but I dont think anyone expects anything else from a news sourfce of this size.  

France 24

A very simple application but the only one of its kind on this list. The France 24 new app is primarily a video application. The application loads and then you click on one of the options below and you get video news of that topic. They seem to be updated regularly enough. That said the design of the application could be a little better and if you weren’t in a 3G covered area then this application is really of no use to you.

The videos themselves once you let them buffer for a while are of an acceptable level of quality. The app also has the nice distinction of being available in 3 languages – English, and as its primarily aimed at the French market, Arabic and French. Unfortunately when the app is changing to the video, it goes completely black and it looks like the application has crashed when in fact it hasn’t. Not the first time we’ve seen this on the list but this black loading screen seems to last a good bit longer. The application itself is a case of sticking to what they know but the design could use a little sprucing up.

Tags: free apps, free news applications, iPhone, Iphone Applications, iphone apps, Ireland, Mainstream Media, new apps, news applications, News Headlines