

Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it) - jemmons
http://fourstarstudios.com/thedaily.html

======
corin_
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
>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
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.)

~~~
jemmons
FYI, an app submitted to the app store is available everywhere by default
(there's an "everywhere" checkbox). If you want to limit its availability, you
have to go in and specifically check the regions it'll be available in.

So yeah, it's harder to distribute US-only than to the world. Not sure what
The Daily's reasoning is there.

~~~
p0ppe
It could be a license-issue. The Daily seems to use wire material from AP. Not
sure about their pricing, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's cheaper to
distribute their texts in the US alone.

------
ryanpetrich
"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
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
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.

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

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

Go figure.

------
tectonic
Who developed the app?

------
cabalamat
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
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
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
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>

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cubicle67
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
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
...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
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
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.

