
Daring Fireball: The Daily Wait - atularora
http://daringfireball.net/2011/02/the_daily_wait
======
aresant
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>

~~~
silvestrov
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.

------
ghshephard
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
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.

------
Qz
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...

------
zachallaun
_Three days, three issues._

Anyone else left wondering what the other two issues were?

[edit] Well, this is embarrassing...

~~~
conesus
I wouldn't be embarrassed. You just demonstrated one of the most crucial
traits for crossword puzzle solving.

~~~
mahmud
I'm a champ at Soduku but could never solve crosswords in ANY language, and I
speak four!

------
beej71
They're going to fix it in the next release by changing the wait spinner to a
rotating multicolored disc. All better.

~~~
b_emery
My parents call it the rainbow pizza. As in 'the damn rainbow pizza again!'.

~~~
schrototo
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
Also known as 'kaiserki' in Poland, 'kaiser rolls' in the UK.

------
trotsky
_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
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.

------
tantalor
Just read The Daily: Indexed at <http://thedailyindexed.tumblr.com/>

No wait, full articles, with video. Plus it works in any web browser, not just
the iPad.

------
UtestMe
"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.

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

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

------
mortenjorck
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.

~~~
lambda
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
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.

------
Terretta
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.

~~~
jasonlotito
> 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.

~~~
wisty
Why is that? I can get to the front page slashdot in 6 seconds, my favorite
newspaper in 4, and HN in 3.

I can't see how a few jpegs and some markup takes 120 seconds to download.

Or perhaps they are putting everything in a much chunkier format?

~~~
sixtofour
Maybe it's downloading code that then manages the download. The same code.
Every issue.

------
quinndupont
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
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.

~~~
DougBTX
Downloading at night would be a good feature, but not one they would be able
to implement without Apple's backing.

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

~~~
jpr
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_
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
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
"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
This is not unique to The Daily. Popular Science and Wired are exactly the
same (maybe others, too). (This is not an excuse. They all suck equally in
that respect.) I suspect that they all use some sort of InDesign plugin or
something similar.

------
adolph
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-
br...](http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/02/03/020411-news-boxes-briefs-1/)

------
cobralibre
Is _The Daily_ truly a daily? If so, the wait's _really_ long by 2011
standards.

------
AbnormalGun
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.

------
mwg66
Is The Daily available outside the US?

~~~
ugh
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
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
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.

------
collypops
Breaking News! John Gruber Not Impressed By Apple Offering

~~~
ugh
Hey, you are doubly wrong, congratulations! The Daily is not an Apple offering
and Gruber is often critical of Apple offerings.

~~~
tomjen3
He is right. The problem would not have been a problem were it not for apples
stupid limitation on things that can run in the background.

The only sane way to do this is obviously to run it in the background
overnight, a thing any program can do on android.

~~~
raganwald
This app fails to show something, anything, within the first ten seconds, and
the problem is that it can't download issues overnight? No, the problem is
that it fails to show something in the first ten seconds.

This argument is a false dichotomy, suggesting that the only two options are
download things overnight or wait a huge amount of time to show something.
Other apps show something in the first ten seconds, so clearly there are more
than two options possible here, and given that iOS doesn't allow overnight
downloading, the criticism here is that the developers failed to choose the
best option of those available.

Arguing that Apple should allow overnight downloading is interesting, but not
related to what these developers should do.

~~~
collypops
I agree. I feel that an app that has had Apple's good name attached to it
should have at least went through better testing, perhaps even by Apple
themselves. The suggestion that Gruber makes about the app having a page that
slowly populates with content over time is great. I hope the developers
consider something along those lines.

