Pulse is the anti-newspaper; a news aggregation creation of two youngster graduates. You could go to the loo, fire up the content grids, which are like prettier, pictorial RSS feeds and within seconds your fingers have swiped 20 or so grids of news from multiple sources and maybe delved into a few. Content bursts at a pulse-like speed with the user in complete control of navigation as you flick in and out of what interests. You can hover over one source in detail in portrait, or skim up and down through up to 20 sources in landscape. The usable interface suits all reading habits.
NOTE: This post is part of our “The 10 Best iPad Applications for News” series. Do check back and view the latest reviews.
Digital Post
The Digital Post straddles authentic, newspaper design and modern innovation. Its ability to aggregate multiple sources attracts the ‘nomadic’ reader concerned with varied and mass content at speed over brand loyalty. It exploits the inability of print to provide user-chosen content and lets the reader pioneer the search from neatly divided categories. This is the major superiority of digital, malleable content over newspapers. Yet, respect for the authentic, reputable design of newspaper print shines through and Digital Post is trying to pretend it is a paper as much as possible, even the point of a tedious little virtual coffee stain. It is definitely an app. for the pad user that cannot quite let go of the old design; a memory which the ad can sustain with its overgenerous screen size.
NOTE: This post is part of our “The 10 Best iPad Applications for News” series. Do check back and view the latest reviews.
Who needs Inception? We’ve formed our own world here in these pixels; a society formed brick by brick, tag by tag and like by like. And now our society has its own ‘glossy’.
Flipboard is the natural extension of the consumer-driven, news delivery ecosystem that is the iPad. The content here is not just chosen by us, it is us; our lives and our tweets. Flipboard is highly relevant in our current social targeting phenomenon, where corporations are hungry to know our friends and our tastes; where behavioural tracking drives advertising. So why shouldn’t our local magazine be tailored exactly to our tastes? We don’t need editors to spoon-feed us news – let’s have an editorial anarchy!
NOTE: This post is part of our “The 10 Best iPad Applications for News” series. Do check back and view the latest reviews.
Press Reader iPad App
This application is free to download, and offers a huge range of news titles (some of which are free and some are paid). There are over 1,500 full content newspapers and magazines on offer, presented as exact digital replicas, which are zoomable and flippable. It is easily to navigate publications using thumbnails or a table of contents.
This application also adds in non-print elements, including audio. You have the option of an on-demand radio and you can press an audio button to listen to the content. There is a share-by-email function, but nothing for the major social platforms. It is claimed that the landscape mode will be arriving soon. In terms of whether portrait or landscape mode is more successful for media apps, it is completely up to the consumer, as part of the revolution of user having more control over their content and the methods with which they read it.
NOTE: This post is part of our “The 10 Best iPad Applications for News” series. Do check back and view the latest reviews.
Reuters News
After developing a successful app for the iPhone, Reuters released the Reuters News Pro app and Reuteries Galleries app for the iPad, with a deliberate focus on video graphics and interactivity, such as interactive charting and financial data manipulation. Users can experience horizontal scrolling and split-screen reading, (which might not be a preference for many who like the fact that the iPad platform boasts a wide surface for visuals), and a caching mechanism that enables offline reading. The addition of the Reuters Galleries app for iPad is also to help showcase award-winning news photography and video, offering stunning visuals that maximise the potential of the iPad graphics and multimedia system. Reuters seem to have, more than others, concentrated particularly on developing an app that tries to take as much advantage of the iPad attributes. There is no cost, and, while featuring similar aspects as others news groups such as around-the-clock news headlines and video footage, Reuters app also offer detailed company profiles, including business descriptions, officer and director profiles and contact details. Within the first two weeks, downloads had already reached 75,000, and reports have surfaced announcing that users spend triple the amount of time on Reuters iPad app than the website. While numbers are impressive, it remains to be seen if the app, (as is true for all the other iPad news apps), really do have staying power or whether or not consumers will stick around after the glow of the shiny new gadget starts to fade…
NOTE: This post is part of our “The 10 Best iPad Applications for News” series. Do check back and view the latest reviews.
News International – the Sunday Times and The Times
The News International Group owned by Rupert Murdoch unleashed their new paywall-protected websites for the Sunday Times and The Times to replace the one-stop Timesonline.co.uk domain, and also announced they would be among the latest titles to release iPad app versions of their newspapers. The Times app saw 5,000 downloads in its first three days. While News International has defended its decision of paid-for digital versions of their papers, critics have argued that advertising revenue will be enough to sustain quality journalism; for its iPad version, the company is limiting its inventory to six advertisers. The Times edition will also feature interactive graphics, picture galleries and video usage. Basic features include editorial content from the day’s newspaper, and, for those already subscribing to either or both of those papers, is free access with no payment. For less enthusiastic readers who haven’t pledged their allegiance by paying for either paper’s online content, it remains to be seen whether they’d be any more willing to pay the monthly subscription fee for the iPad version.
NOTE: This post is part of our “The 10 Best iPad Applications for News” series. Do check back and view the latest reviews.
BBC News
The BBC News app for the iPad offers pretty much the same content as on the website: breaking news, top stories and other headlines, news clips, and the live BBC World Service radio. In addition, it also supports news in many translations, a customizable menu where you can personalise your news reading experience, (choose what news interests you), and, unlike the Financial Times, is easily shared by email, Twitter and Facebook. While it contains advertising to support its commercial activity outside the UK, the BBC app is free to download and use. Apart from video and audio streaming, the app also automatically downloads content so you can read news articles you’ve clicked on when you’re offline. So far it doesn’t really appear to be very interactive, but for a non-priced, high quality content download, it seems unlikely that most users would sneer that there is identical content on the website.
