8 ms·

Daring Fireball: The Daily Wait

100 points by atularora 16y ago

quinndupont 16y ago
And it doesn't download in the background! Between the 1 minute wait and the requirement that you launch it daily it misses all the good stuff about the old dead-tree version.
- alexknight 16y ago
  The good news is that this is software, so they can definitely fix the issues with the app itself. What remains to be seen is how high the quality of the writing will be and if they can sustain it.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - DougBTX 16y ago
    Downloading at night would be a good feature, but not one they would be able to implement without Apple's backing.
trotsky 16y ago
Imagine a paper newspaper that was wrapped in an envelope, and the envelope was so difficult to open that it took over a minute before you could see the front page of the issue. Who would buy that newspaper? No one, that’s who. It takes me longer than a minute twenty to walk to the curb and back to pick up the wall street journal. Perhaps Gruber has figured out the reason that no one has ever read newspapers?
- BCM43 16y ago
  I think the important difference is that you are actively doing something while getting the paper. You go outside, and have something to look at while you are waiting. Perhaps if he opened it a bit before he knew he would need it, and did something in the meantime it would be easier to wait.
Terretta 16y ago
He's right it's slow to let you interact. He's dead wrong that it doesn't download in the background. Most reviewers commented on the sluggish cover flow without realizing it's still downloading for quite some time once you get the first pages. Watch the spinner in upper left. Most of the issue downloads AFTER you can interact.
- pangram 16y ago
  That makes it sound even worse, actually -- it takes 80 seconds to start up and it still isn't finished? What is it doing for those first 80 seconds?
  - Terretta 16y ago
    Possibly getting the visual thumbnail index, cover, toc, and if they're nuts, intro video (talking head telling you what stories are in the issue). There's an option to autostart the talking head, they think it's that cool.
    - hallmark 16y ago
      To add insult to injury, the quality of the cover flow images is horrendous. The JPEG artifacting makes the sub-headlines difficult to read, so it's not just an aesthetic complaint; it is yet another usability problem. PS - I decided to open up The Daily to confirm that the JPEG artifacts do not go away after further loading. They do not. However, it is a little after midnight for me now, so when I opened the app, I hit the "A new issue of The Daily is being delivered" wait screen. How poetic.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  > He's dead wrong that it doesn't download in the background. You're reading this wrong. What you're describing isn't what he was talking about. He's talking about letting it download in the background, as in, iPad is sleeping, and it automatically downloads over night, without having the app open. He does mention background downloading how you describe it. He does, however, mention that waiting a minute twenty to even get to that stage is annoying. Basically, he says that it should open up within 10 seconds, and download in the background as needed. Not a minute twenty.
beej71 16y ago
They're going to fix it in the next release by changing the wait spinner to a rotating multicolored disc. All better.
- lotusleaf1987 16y ago
  I heard it was actually going to be an hourglass.
- b_emery 16y ago
  My parents call it the rainbow pizza. As in 'the damn rainbow pizza again!'.
  - pyre 16y ago
    Why a rainbow pizza? Why not a pinwheel or a beach ball?
  - schrototo 16y ago
    Here in Austria, I've heard some people call it the "Psychosemmel" (a Semmel being an Austrian kind of bread roll... do a GIS and you'll see the resemblance).
    - webignition 16y ago
      Also known as 'kaiserki' in Poland, 'kaiser rolls' in the UK.
zachallaun 16y ago
Three days, three issues. Anyone else left wondering what the other two issues were? [edit] Well, this is embarrassing...
- scottjackson 16y ago
  I sense you might be making a joke, but just in case: I'm pretty sure he means that three issues of The Daily have come out in the three days since the app's debut.
- kmfrk 16y ago
  Three issues of the magazines. Issues as in copies or volumes - not problems.
- cwp 16y ago
  He meant issues of the newspaper - it's a daily, so there's a new "issue" every day. Or were you joking?
- conesus 16y ago
  I wouldn't be embarrassed. You just demonstrated one of the most crucial traits for crossword puzzle solving.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    I'm a champ at Soduku but could never solve crosswords in ANY language, and I speak four!
cobralibre 16y ago
Is The Daily truly a daily? If so, the wait's really long by 2011 standards.
aresant 16y ago
From Jakob Nielsen's "Response Time Limits": "10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect." Read on crystal clear explanation of why this is and how to build around if load time is a must: http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html
- silvestrov 16y ago
  The most important things are often very banal. Most people don't like to be banal, they like to be fancy. So they end up ignoring the most important things (both in business and their private life). Maybe this is why Jakob Nielsen is so hated: he allows himself to be banal, he allows his web-design to be banal, he allows his conclusions and suggestions to be banal.
tantalor 16y ago
Just read The Daily: Indexed at http://thedailyindexed.tumblr.com/ http://thedailyindexed.tumblr.com/ No wait, full articles, with video. Plus it works in any web browser, not just the iPad.
mortenjorck 16y ago
I think what this really points to is the need for a background content-fetching API in iOS. Battery life spent loading is battery life spent loading whether the user is there or not; the key is to integrate it into the push framework so that battery life isn't wasted on polling. I'm really hoping this is part of iOS 5.
- wdewind 16y ago
  Seems pretty unlikely, though would be awesome. One of the major problems Jobs has insisted on abstracting away from the consumer is battery management. Time spent loading is time spent loading, but Jobs wont stand for customers being confused between their battery being broken and just having a lot of background content downloading without them noticing.
- brianpan 16y ago
  Exactly the opposite. The content should be fetch as-needed. Background fetching would get all the content whether or not it's ever read. If all the apps I've grown tired of are still fetching data in the background, that IS more battery life. Or if I only read one section of the Daily when it's downloaded it all. Having background fetching available would just let the Daily off the hook for designing the app the way it should! Other news apps have solved the problem. Safari can retrieve the entire internet without background fetching. Surely the Daily's problem is easier than Safari's.
- lambda 16y ago
  The problem with background content loading is that you never know if it's content the user is ever going to look at. It would be pretty easy to install a few apps to try out that you never wind up looking at again, and then your device spends a lot of time and battery loading the content overnight, and you wonder why your battery is dying even though you're not using it much.
  - mortenjorck 16y ago
    There's a simple solution to this: Restrict push-downloads to one unread at a time. If the user hasn't relaunched the app since the last download, nothing else comes through until they do.
sixtofour 16y ago
If this was the 90s we could turn off images.
- jpr 16y ago
  Or if we had a proper browser that still had that possibility... Oh wait, we do have those, but I don't if they are allowed on the iDevices.
  - _djo_ 16y ago
    Atomic Web Browser, Mercury Web Browser, iCab Mobile, Terra and Opera Mini are some examples of alternative browsers that have additional features to the standard iPad Safari install. There are many others. Not that an alternative browser would matter in this case, because The Daily is an app, not a website.
    - ugh 16y ago
      The Daily is actually all images on no text (like quite a few other magazines on the iPad). This is so incredibly stupid and such a horrible step backwards. It balloons the file size (that’s probably one of the major contributing factors to the long wait time), it introduces ugly artifacts (they seem to be using JPG), it doesn’t allow the user to copy or search text and it’s an absolute abomination when it comes to accessibility. iOS has a great built-in screenreader and it just doesn’t work with The Daily. All that for something that’s not even that beautiful. We desperately need better HTML5 authoring tools, something like InDesign. It would be so nice if The Daily were using Webkit.
      - sixtofour 16y ago
        "The Daily is actually all images on no text ..." Well, you wouldn't want to risk customers stealing an article. Or a verb. Gawd, you can almost hear Murdoch's bones turning to stone.
        ugh 16y ago
Qz 16y ago
I noticed that Amazon has (relatively) recently changed their results pages so that it preloads the first 4 results of the next page. When you click next, the next 4 results show immediately, and then the rest of the results start loading. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of dollars that small change is earning them...
collypops 16y ago
Breaking News! John Gruber Not Impressed By Apple Offering
- ugh 16y ago
  Hey, you are doubly wrong, congratulations! The Daily is not an Apple offering and Gruber is often critical of Apple offerings.
  - collypops 16y ago
    I understand that my comment may look like the sort of thing that would appear on a lesser news aggregation / community website that shall remain unnamed, but I promise I never intended it as such. Nor did I attempt to attract the kind of fire-poking (flaming, trolling, or whatever the cool kids call it these days) responses that usually follow such comments, but I guess there's only so much we can convey in text when we don't take the time to elaborate. The Daily is a collaboration between Apple and News Corp. I'm not going to post links to various sources here that state that fact. Google is an excellent resource for finding out such things - I regularly consult it before attempting to shoot down people's comments (just in case my argument is unfounded). I also respect HN's rules about posting links all over the place. Although John Gruber has been critical of Apple in the past, he is thought of by many (especially of late) to be Apple's unpaid mascot; solidly supporting their opinions on the Flash situation and the WebM/H.264 debate. To be honest, my comment was more to do with my feelings on his recent behaviour, because I connected more with the John Gruber that brought us Markdown and other great things, rather then John Gruber the Apple fanboy. I just wish we got to see more of that side of him, but it seems to be fading. I don't appreciate your congratulations. I never entered the ugh pageant, and nobody likes to win the 'doubly wrong' prize, especially when they're not. I think that next time I'll provide a bit more information, lest someone think that I'm here to spout sensationalist drivel.
    - ugh 16y ago
      Apple did the subscription stuff (Gruber was not critical of that), the app and its content (which Gruber is criticizing) is wholly developed and created by News Corp. An endorsement by Apple and some collaboration on the subscription APIs does not make this an Apple offering in any way. And Gruber still is critical of Apple. That’s not a thing of the past. Just because he doesn’t agree with some of your personal opinions about something doesn’t make him an fanboy (which is a stupid word anyway and should never be used to describe anyone. It’s a lame dismissal of serious debate, a conversation stopper.)
ghshephard 16y ago
I'm a huge, huge news junkie. I read the NYT and WSJ daily. (NYT online, WSJ in the APP). I also read several magazine via Zinio, and get the new Yorker, economist, and wired apps on my iPad. There is no easy way to say this - the first revision of "The Daily" is an embarrassment. When I pick up the WSJ - it's about 10 seconds after I launch that I start reading that days paper. The Daily not only takes so long to start, that I've _already_ lost interest in trying to read it, the total download time is so excessive that I never bother to let the entire thing download. WSJ is quick, snappy. I realize a lot of this is because of the massive video / photo content - but they need to do something about this App quickly or their going to lose 80% of their potential audience before they even _try_ reading the darn thing.
- djbriane 16y ago
  To be fair, when the WSJ app first launched on the iPad it took at least a minute to download each issue. They had no 'staged' loading so you had to sit there and watch a progress bar before you could read a single article.
mwg66 16y ago
Is The Daily available outside the US?
- ugh 16y ago
  Doesn’t look like it is. I can’t download it in the German App Store. (This is so stupid. I certainly don’t want to buy The Daily but it’s not the only offender in this regard. I would assume that making The Daily available in every App Store in existence is a matter of clicking a checkbox or something like that. What’s stopping them? Are there legal issues?)
  - mwg66 16y ago
    Indeed. I don't expect to be an avid reader but I wouldn't mind the opportunity. I'm with Gruber - this is doomed.
billmcneale 16y ago
And when, at some point in the future, iOS gains the ability to do downloads while the phone is in your pocket, Gruber will salute this as yet another crushing evidence of Apple's innovative spirit, forgetting that Android has been able to do this since 1.0.
UtestMe 16y ago
"It takes you several minutes to go and buy a physical newspaper" - this is not an argument. The dynamics of a mobile app is so different than real life's. Imagine you play one of Zynga's games and wait 2 physical years for the animal to grow up. There's no doubt any mobile app showing you instant and hot content should start blazing fast, so that it serves your impulses. We are reading news out of our impulse; although we may alocate specific times of the day for it, it's not a programed action like reading a thousand pages fanatsy novel; therefore if a news app fails to satisfy that impulse (quickly, efficiently, in critical time and dimensions) then you may say the app is not serving you well enough. In my opinion, it doesn't matter the name of the author, he's got a point.
adolph 16y ago
I don't know why the dude is bothering with it. The first link I click has stuff recycled from HN of months ago: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/02/03/020411-news-boxes-briefs-1/ http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/02/03/020411-news-boxes-br...
zb 16y ago
I'm also amused by the fact that the weather forecast simply reads "11:56 AM, Mostly".
- losvedir 16y ago
  Oh, you're right! I had missed that. It sounds very Douglas Adams to me.
AbnormalGun 16y ago
Personally, I would like to see an app like Instapaper combined with a licensed AP news feed. I don't really need images or fancy graphics or movies; I just want to read the news.

100 points by atularora 16y ago

And it doesn't download in the background! Between the 1 minute wait and the requirement that you launch it daily it misses all the good stuff about the old dead-tree version.

alexknight 16y ago
The good news is that this is software, so they can definitely fix the issues with the app itself. What remains to be seen is how high the quality of the writing will be and if they can sustain it.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- DougBTX 16y ago
  Downloading at night would be a good feature, but not one they would be able to implement without Apple's backing.

trotsky 16y ago

Imagine a paper newspaper that was wrapped in an envelope, and the envelope was so difficult to open that it took over a minute before you could see the front page of the issue. Who would buy that newspaper? No one, that’s who. It takes me longer than a minute twenty to walk to the curb and back to pick up the wall street journal. Perhaps Gruber has figured out the reason that no one has ever read newspapers?

BCM43 16y ago
I think the important difference is that you are actively doing something while getting the paper. You go outside, and have something to look at while you are waiting. Perhaps if he opened it a bit before he knew he would need it, and did something in the meantime it would be easier to wait.

Terretta 16y ago

He's right it's slow to let you interact. He's dead wrong that it doesn't download in the background. Most reviewers commented on the sluggish cover flow without realizing it's still downloading for quite some time once you get the first pages. Watch the spinner in upper left. Most of the issue downloads AFTER you can interact.

pangram 16y ago
That makes it sound even worse, actually -- it takes 80 seconds to start up and it still isn't finished? What is it doing for those first 80 seconds?
- Terretta 16y ago
  Possibly getting the visual thumbnail index, cover, toc, and if they're nuts, intro video (talking head telling you what stories are in the issue). There's an option to autostart the talking head, they think it's that cool.
  - hallmark 16y ago
    To add insult to injury, the quality of the cover flow images is horrendous. The JPEG artifacting makes the sub-headlines difficult to read, so it's not just an aesthetic complaint; it is yet another usability problem. PS - I decided to open up The Daily to confirm that the JPEG artifacts do not go away after further loading. They do not. However, it is a little after midnight for me now, so when I opened the app, I hit the "A new issue of The Daily is being delivered" wait screen. How poetic.
jasonlotito 16y ago
> He's dead wrong that it doesn't download in the background. You're reading this wrong. What you're describing isn't what he was talking about. He's talking about letting it download in the background, as in, iPad is sleeping, and it automatically downloads over night, without having the app open. He does mention background downloading how you describe it. He does, however, mention that waiting a minute twenty to even get to that stage is annoying. Basically, he says that it should open up within 10 seconds, and download in the background as needed. Not a minute twenty.

beej71 16y ago

They're going to fix it in the next release by changing the wait spinner to a rotating multicolored disc. All better.

lotusleaf1987 16y ago
I heard it was actually going to be an hourglass.
b_emery 16y ago
My parents call it the rainbow pizza. As in 'the damn rainbow pizza again!'.
- pyre 16y ago
  Why a rainbow pizza? Why not a pinwheel or a beach ball?
- schrototo 16y ago
  Here in Austria, I've heard some people call it the "Psychosemmel" (a Semmel being an Austrian kind of bread roll... do a GIS and you'll see the resemblance).
  - webignition 16y ago
    Also known as 'kaiserki' in Poland, 'kaiser rolls' in the UK.

zachallaun 16y ago

Three days, three issues. Anyone else left wondering what the other two issues were? [edit] Well, this is embarrassing...

scottjackson 16y ago
I sense you might be making a joke, but just in case: I'm pretty sure he means that three issues of The Daily have come out in the three days since the app's debut.
kmfrk 16y ago
Three issues of the magazines. Issues as in copies or volumes - not problems.
cwp 16y ago
He meant issues of the newspaper - it's a daily, so there's a new "issue" every day. Or were you joking?
conesus 16y ago
I wouldn't be embarrassed. You just demonstrated one of the most crucial traits for crossword puzzle solving.
- mahmud 16y ago
  I'm a champ at Soduku but could never solve crosswords in ANY language, and I speak four!

cobralibre 16y ago

Is The Daily truly a daily? If so, the wait's really long by 2011 standards.

aresant 16y ago

From Jakob Nielsen's "Response Time Limits": "10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect." Read on crystal clear explanation of why this is and how to build around if load time is a must: http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html

silvestrov 16y ago
The most important things are often very banal. Most people don't like to be banal, they like to be fancy. So they end up ignoring the most important things (both in business and their private life). Maybe this is why Jakob Nielsen is so hated: he allows himself to be banal, he allows his web-design to be banal, he allows his conclusions and suggestions to be banal.

tantalor 16y ago

Just read The Daily: Indexed at http://thedailyindexed.tumblr.com/ http://thedailyindexed.tumblr.com/ No wait, full articles, with video. Plus it works in any web browser, not just the iPad.

mortenjorck 16y ago

I think what this really points to is the need for a background content-fetching API in iOS. Battery life spent loading is battery life spent loading whether the user is there or not; the key is to integrate it into the push framework so that battery life isn't wasted on polling. I'm really hoping this is part of iOS 5.

wdewind 16y ago
Seems pretty unlikely, though would be awesome. One of the major problems Jobs has insisted on abstracting away from the consumer is battery management. Time spent loading is time spent loading, but Jobs wont stand for customers being confused between their battery being broken and just having a lot of background content downloading without them noticing.
brianpan 16y ago
Exactly the opposite. The content should be fetch as-needed. Background fetching would get all the content whether or not it's ever read. If all the apps I've grown tired of are still fetching data in the background, that IS more battery life. Or if I only read one section of the Daily when it's downloaded it all. Having background fetching available would just let the Daily off the hook for designing the app the way it should! Other news apps have solved the problem. Safari can retrieve the entire internet without background fetching. Surely the Daily's problem is easier than Safari's.
lambda 16y ago
The problem with background content loading is that you never know if it's content the user is ever going to look at. It would be pretty easy to install a few apps to try out that you never wind up looking at again, and then your device spends a lot of time and battery loading the content overnight, and you wonder why your battery is dying even though you're not using it much.
- mortenjorck 16y ago
  There's a simple solution to this: Restrict push-downloads to one unread at a time. If the user hasn't relaunched the app since the last download, nothing else comes through until they do.

sixtofour 16y ago

If this was the 90s we could turn off images.

jpr 16y ago
Or if we had a proper browser that still had that possibility... Oh wait, we do have those, but I don't if they are allowed on the iDevices.
- _djo_ 16y ago
  Atomic Web Browser, Mercury Web Browser, iCab Mobile, Terra and Opera Mini are some examples of alternative browsers that have additional features to the standard iPad Safari install. There are many others. Not that an alternative browser would matter in this case, because The Daily is an app, not a website.
  - ugh 16y ago
    The Daily is actually all images on no text (like quite a few other magazines on the iPad). This is so incredibly stupid and such a horrible step backwards. It balloons the file size (that’s probably one of the major contributing factors to the long wait time), it introduces ugly artifacts (they seem to be using JPG), it doesn’t allow the user to copy or search text and it’s an absolute abomination when it comes to accessibility. iOS has a great built-in screenreader and it just doesn’t work with The Daily. All that for something that’s not even that beautiful. We desperately need better HTML5 authoring tools, something like InDesign. It would be so nice if The Daily were using Webkit.
    - sixtofour 16y ago
      "The Daily is actually all images on no text ..." Well, you wouldn't want to risk customers stealing an article. Or a verb. Gawd, you can almost hear Murdoch's bones turning to stone.
      - ugh 16y ago

Qz 16y ago

I noticed that Amazon has (relatively) recently changed their results pages so that it preloads the first 4 results of the next page. When you click next, the next 4 results show immediately, and then the rest of the results start loading. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of dollars that small change is earning them...

collypops 16y ago

Breaking News! John Gruber Not Impressed By Apple Offering

ugh 16y ago
Hey, you are doubly wrong, congratulations! The Daily is not an Apple offering and Gruber is often critical of Apple offerings.
- collypops 16y ago
  I understand that my comment may look like the sort of thing that would appear on a lesser news aggregation / community website that shall remain unnamed, but I promise I never intended it as such. Nor did I attempt to attract the kind of fire-poking (flaming, trolling, or whatever the cool kids call it these days) responses that usually follow such comments, but I guess there's only so much we can convey in text when we don't take the time to elaborate. The Daily is a collaboration between Apple and News Corp. I'm not going to post links to various sources here that state that fact. Google is an excellent resource for finding out such things - I regularly consult it before attempting to shoot down people's comments (just in case my argument is unfounded). I also respect HN's rules about posting links all over the place. Although John Gruber has been critical of Apple in the past, he is thought of by many (especially of late) to be Apple's unpaid mascot; solidly supporting their opinions on the Flash situation and the WebM/H.264 debate. To be honest, my comment was more to do with my feelings on his recent behaviour, because I connected more with the John Gruber that brought us Markdown and other great things, rather then John Gruber the Apple fanboy. I just wish we got to see more of that side of him, but it seems to be fading. I don't appreciate your congratulations. I never entered the ugh pageant, and nobody likes to win the 'doubly wrong' prize, especially when they're not. I think that next time I'll provide a bit more information, lest someone think that I'm here to spout sensationalist drivel.
  - ugh 16y ago
    Apple did the subscription stuff (Gruber was not critical of that), the app and its content (which Gruber is criticizing) is wholly developed and created by News Corp. An endorsement by Apple and some collaboration on the subscription APIs does not make this an Apple offering in any way. And Gruber still is critical of Apple. That’s not a thing of the past. Just because he doesn’t agree with some of your personal opinions about something doesn’t make him an fanboy (which is a stupid word anyway and should never be used to describe anyone. It’s a lame dismissal of serious debate, a conversation stopper.)

ghshephard 16y ago

I'm a huge, huge news junkie. I read the NYT and WSJ daily. (NYT online, WSJ in the APP). I also read several magazine via Zinio, and get the new Yorker, economist, and wired apps on my iPad. There is no easy way to say this - the first revision of "The Daily" is an embarrassment. When I pick up the WSJ - it's about 10 seconds after I launch that I start reading that days paper. The Daily not only takes so long to start, that I've _already_ lost interest in trying to read it, the total download time is so excessive that I never bother to let the entire thing download. WSJ is quick, snappy. I realize a lot of this is because of the massive video / photo content - but they need to do something about this App quickly or their going to lose 80% of their potential audience before they even _try_ reading the darn thing.

djbriane 16y ago
To be fair, when the WSJ app first launched on the iPad it took at least a minute to download each issue. They had no 'staged' loading so you had to sit there and watch a progress bar before you could read a single article.

mwg66 16y ago

Is The Daily available outside the US?

ugh 16y ago
Doesn’t look like it is. I can’t download it in the German App Store. (This is so stupid. I certainly don’t want to buy The Daily but it’s not the only offender in this regard. I would assume that making The Daily available in every App Store in existence is a matter of clicking a checkbox or something like that. What’s stopping them? Are there legal issues?)
- mwg66 16y ago
  Indeed. I don't expect to be an avid reader but I wouldn't mind the opportunity. I'm with Gruber - this is doomed.

billmcneale 16y ago

And when, at some point in the future, iOS gains the ability to do downloads while the phone is in your pocket, Gruber will salute this as yet another crushing evidence of Apple's innovative spirit, forgetting that Android has been able to do this since 1.0.

UtestMe 16y ago

"It takes you several minutes to go and buy a physical newspaper" - this is not an argument. The dynamics of a mobile app is so different than real life's. Imagine you play one of Zynga's games and wait 2 physical years for the animal to grow up. There's no doubt any mobile app showing you instant and hot content should start blazing fast, so that it serves your impulses. We are reading news out of our impulse; although we may alocate specific times of the day for it, it's not a programed action like reading a thousand pages fanatsy novel; therefore if a news app fails to satisfy that impulse (quickly, efficiently, in critical time and dimensions) then you may say the app is not serving you well enough. In my opinion, it doesn't matter the name of the author, he's got a point.

adolph 16y ago

I don't know why the dude is bothering with it. The first link I click has stuff recycled from HN of months ago: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/02/03/020411-news-boxes-briefs-1/ http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/02/03/020411-news-boxes-br...

zb 16y ago

I'm also amused by the fact that the weather forecast simply reads "11:56 AM, Mostly".

losvedir 16y ago
Oh, you're right! I had missed that. It sounds very Douglas Adams to me.

AbnormalGun 16y ago

Personally, I would like to see an app like Instapaper combined with a licensed AP news feed. I don't really need images or fancy graphics or movies; I just want to read the news.