When the venerable New York Times creates a news reader application for the design-centric iPhone platform, you expect Quality. You expect that the experience of browsing through some of the best news articles written in the USA will be easy, seamless, and a delight.
And it pretty much is. The front page allows you to quickly view news headlines (which, thanks to the excellent Times editorial staff, are always accurate to the stories they represent) and scroll quickly down the list to older stories you may have missed. My main complaint about this page is that the associated thumbnail photos arrive slowly or not at all, even when I’m connected via WiFi. (See the screenshot– empty thumbnails appear as grey boxes.)
Photo Browser
This is an unexpected joy of the NYTimes application. I can quickly get an overview of the most interesting photos of the day. But often, I can only get the overview. If I actually click on any of the beautiful thumbnail images, I’m disappointed by a “Loading” screen that shows for a few minutes, and the full-size image fails to load. (Yes, this happens even when I’m connected via WiFi to one of the fattest broadband pipes in the world.) My gut instinct as a developer tells me that this is not a problem with the iPhone app software itself, but with the backend server that the Times is using.
Conclusion
The NYTimes reader works well, and is a joy to use, when it works. It seems that it may have already been overwhelmed by its own popularity.
Categories: Uncategorized
First of all, let me say that I love
Twitterrific and the developer behind it (Craig Hockenberry). It was given an Apple Design Award at WWDC this year, and rightly so. They’ve effectively moved all of the interesting features of the desktop Twitterrific to the Cocoa Touch platform, and they’ve released both a free, ad-supported version and a paid version.
Having said that, there are some bits of Twitterrific that bug me, and might explain why I trade off between it, Twinkle, and Twitter’s own mobile website.
Hints
Ok, maybe iPhone users are idiots, but I’m a big fan of the “show-don’t-tell” school of UI design. If Apple didn’t find it necessary to create something like Hints to “tell” about e.g. the new push data (“Fetch New Data”) model, then why did Twitterrific need to create it? If this feature is really necessary, then perhaps this simple twitter client is…not so simple.
Complexity without Benefit
Twitterrific is jam-packed with just about as many features as you can currently fit into an iPhone app. They even provide instructions on how to back-link from Safari into Twitterrific, in case you ever dared want to run anything but Twitterrific. (Note: I think it speaks more to Apple’s support for third-party developers than anything else that this process requires hand-editing a funky URL.)
Frankly, it’s kinda overwhelming, and yet not as powerful as you might think.
Take for instance User Info. Although you can find out all sorts of things about the user: read their latest twit, find out their location, and view their profile, you can’t actually unfollow them. The UI design of the twit view itself seems to violate the simple-is-elegant drill-down model of iPhone UI design: with six action buttons available on this one screen, it’s quite cluttered.
Conclusion
Overall I think Twitterrific is a terrific iPhone app, and quite powerful. For my friends that use Twitter I highly recommend trying this app first and then compare it with the other hokey Twitter apps available for iPhone. However, I also recommend they try Twinkle and the simple Twitter mobile site for Safari. Some find the many features of Twitterrific indispensable, while others are happy with the simplistic Safari site.
Categories: Uncategorized
This app is a travesty. You would think that a major technology company with the massive financial backing of eBay, and undoubtedly the best technical support that Apple could provide, would be able to create an app that actually works well.
Instead, we get an app that seems to break all the rules of good Touch UI design. What the hell is that Login button? Couldn’t you just make something that looked like a form? Even m.paypapl.com, your mobile web site, looks better than this app.
Why must I jump to Safari when I click the “Sign Up” button? You have all the power of a full-blown Cocoa Touch application at your fingertips, and instead you want to send me to a web site??
Also, why can’t I select from a list of previously used payees when sending money? Your website has that feature: why doesn’t your native iPhone app have it? Sure, it’s great that I can select from among the contacts on my iPhone to send money, but I might not have my cable company’s billing email address plugged into my iPhone…
Categories: Uncategorized
On this blog I’ll be bringing to you my undiluted opinions about various iPhone apps obtained from the App Store, and the Cocoa Touch (iPhone and iPod Touch) platform in general.
Categories: Uncategorized
And it pretty much is. The front page allows you to quickly view news headlines (which, thanks to the excellent Times editorial staff, are always accurate to the stories they represent) and scroll quickly down the list to older stories you may have missed. My main complaint about this page is that the associated thumbnail photos arrive slowly or not at all, even when I’m connected via WiFi. (See the screenshot– empty thumbnails appear as grey boxes.)
This is an unexpected joy of the NYTimes application. I can quickly get an overview of the most interesting photos of the day. But often, I can only get the overview. If I actually click on any of the beautiful thumbnail images, I’m disappointed by a “Loading” screen that shows for a few minutes, and the full-size image fails to load. (Yes, this happens even when I’m connected via WiFi to one of the fattest broadband pipes in the world.) My gut instinct as a developer tells me that this is not a problem with the iPhone app software itself, but with the backend server that the Times is using.
