Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)

Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)(fourstarstudios.com)

38 points by jemmons 15 years ago | 30 comments

corin_ 15 years ago |

I can't comment on the quality of the application, because for some reason that I can't understand it doesn't seem to be available for non-US iPad owners. Well, not in the UK at any rate.

Ah well, I guess I'll get by with The Times, Guardian, Telegraph, NY Times, LA Times, FT, WSJ, Int Herald Tribune and La Monde.

(And from the reviews I've heard, seems the content is fairly shoddy anyway, guess I'm not missing much.)

edit: I haven't yet had time myself to bother reading anything, but for anyone who does want to read the content without downloading the iPad app, check out http://thedailyindexed.tumblr.com/ which links to all the day's articles, as they are available on The Daily's website.

tmgrhm 15 years ago | |

>I can't comment on the quality of the application, because for some reason that I can't understand it doesn't seem to be available for non-US iPad owners. Well, not in the UK at any rate.

It's coming to the UK "soon" according to @daily.

Content seems to be pretty heavily US-focused, and as it seems to be (at least in large part) a gossip rag, it was decided against shipping US gossip to rest-of-world customers.

ugh 15 years ago | | |

That doesn’t make any sense, does it?

They don’t have to market it, why not just make it available everywhere? I’m not in principle opposed to the App Store but this is one of those stupid things about it. The cool thing about the web is that by default, everything is available everywhere and it is hard and not foolproof to make something not available everywhere. I can read nytimes.com in Germany despite clearly not being part of the New York Time’s target group.

What reason could there possibly be for not making The Daily available everywhere? Sure, hardly anyone will buy it outside of the US but at least Apple is footing all the bandwidth costs and making it available everywhere must be a matter of clicking some checkbox. Wired and Popular Science are, for example, both available in the German App Store. (Not that I would ever want to buy The Daily but this is just so stupid.)

antirez 15 years ago | |

Opening an US itunes account takes a few seconds if you want to check it today.

Just go into iTunes, select the US store, try downloading the daily, select "create an account", use an email address that is different than the other you used in your real account. In the payment section select "None" (No credit card), and specify an address. Get a random cool address on google map. Put a random phone number. Done.

ryanpetrich 15 years ago |

"The iPhone and iPad have to work a lot harder to display JPEGs than they do to display the equivalent PNGs"

That is a myth. It is the pixel format of the CGImage that matters, not the compression format of the source file. 32bpp premultiplied CGImages are the only format that the GPU will render natively as the contents of a CALayer. Since all JPEGs decode to 24bpp and most PNGs are saved as 32bpp, it's easy to see why this would be confused. Simply copying to a 32bpp CGImage is enough to make drawing quick again.

Coincidentally, this blog post also scrolls poorly on the iPad.

rbritton 15 years ago | |

The iPad (not sure about the iPhone) also has a JPEG hardware decoder. iOS 4.2 finally provided at least some level of access to this and it makes a huge difference.

ryanpetrich 15 years ago | | |

Oh, that went public? I've been using it on the jailbreak side for ages :)

All devices back to the iPhone 3G at least have a hardware JPEG codec.

wazoox 15 years ago | |

However PNG is much better than JPEG at rendering texts. So using JPEG for articles is ridiculous.

robryan 15 years ago |

I am a little confused on what the daily is try to achieve. I've read that they were bringing together a top notch team of journalists to product top notch content. From other thing's it seems like they are content light and are playing on the interactiveness of the ipad to produce somewhat unique and engaging multimedia. And from everywhere I've read that even if they are doing this well the tech fails it horribly.

rorrr 15 years ago | |

They are trying to replicate the old media experience (newspaper) on the new technology. It's a pretty dumb idea. That's what HTML is for, websites have been around long enough and are good enough to present information, especially such simple information as news. I have no idea why anyone would care about this piece of crap app, when you can just open your browser and go to your favorite news site.

robryan 15 years ago | | |

The only stuff I would consider paying for would be those great long investigative articles that magazines like the atlantic or vanity fair do. Normal shortish news articles have become a commodity that is best monetised by advertising. If traditional newspapers can't make a dollar there online leave it to the blog style sites like tech crunch and go after the real substance.

j_baker 15 years ago |

Is it just me, or can anyone else not scroll down to read the whole post on the iPad?

halostatue 15 years ago | |

I managed to do it by using the "two finger scroll"; use two fingers to scroll the text section.

Go figure.

jpadvo 15 years ago | |

Here's a mobile formatted version that is readable on my iPod, at least (courtesy of Google):

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?source=m&u=http://fourstarst...

iron_ball 15 years ago | |

Can't read it all on my Android phone, either.

jemmons 15 years ago | |

Fixed. Very sorry.

tectonic 15 years ago |

Who developed the app?

cabalamat 15 years ago |

I went to their home page (http://www.thedaily.com/) and clicked on the link "Am I going to be billed automatically after the free period". It told me "The URL you requested could not be found."

So let's get their value proposition right. This is a paid news source, appallingly badly executed, that doesn't bring any value that I can't get from free news sources such as Reddit or the BBC or Guardian.

I predict it will sink without trace, after wasting millions of dollars.

cwbrandsma 15 years ago |

I've used the app a bit as well. At first I thought it was just design by committee, but I think that was wrong. It is probably closer to design by committee with a non-technical designer, followed by a development staff that never said no to any request. Either way, more effort was spent on 'cool factor' rather than usability.

PanMan 15 years ago |

It's strange to find a blog of an iOS developer, complaining, which you can't actually read on an iPad. I can't scroll the page at all.

tmgrhm 15 years ago | |

Not sure where his comment's gone, but wzdd correctly pointed out you can scroll this (and any other seemingly unscrollable area) using two fingers, as with a multitouch trackpad.

But I totally agree with you. Not only is it not possible to scroll without the two-fingers trick (which I didn't know about until now, despite being a pretty advanced/heavy iOS user), it also scrolls really jumpily.

But the hypocrisy shouldn't detract from the merit of the article: his points are well-made and correct. Although the article suggests the methods are the problems and that they should change them (e.g. the removal of the carousel and introduction of greyscale thumbnails), but actually these aren't necessary: some iOS developers have taken it upon themselves to improve the daily, and have come up with the following: Loren Brichter (Tweetie/Twitter) optimised the carousel [1] and Jonah Grant optimised page turning [2].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C6s9BLyur4

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IHOCFb_hDE

jemmons 15 years ago | |

Mea culpa. Like I said in the post, I'm not a blogger. I just threw some static html up not thinking of how it would interact with my site styles when needed to scroll. There's now a bit of UA sniffing in there that will display a simple text version if viewed on an iOS device.

As an aside, is it really so unusual to see an iOS (or any mobile platform developer) ignorant of their platform's corner-cases when it comes to things like mail or the web? We spend all our time on laptops coding, just like everyone else ;-)

cubicle67 15 years ago |

if the red of the lhs is distracting, try this

javascript:document.getElementById('menu').style.backgroundColor="#c0c0c0"

[Edit: just realised it's only red if your mouse is over that area, which mine was]

philiphodgen 15 years ago |

Pearls before swine.

I have no bias against Mr. Murdoch but why waste the limited amount of time and energy afforded each of us by freely offering unrequested and uncompensated advice?

raganwald 15 years ago | |

...because every one of us reading these reviews is thinking "I don't want my app to suffer the same fate. Let's make a note about what not to do..."

It's also easier to remember tips and dictums when given an example to ponder than if provided in a vacuum.

robryan 15 years ago | | |

Good way for the author who works in the area to be able to organize their thoughts on the app. Without the structure of the blog post it can be hard to clear your mind and gain some insight from what you are seeing.

amchang 15 years ago |

If I was Apple Inc, I would be happy with people who came up with ideas like the "The Daily." It provides Apple another source of high revenue for almost zero cost. The only thing Apple would need to setup is a payment system for this type of content.