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.
Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
21–30 of 35 posts
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#22It'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.
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Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#23I 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.…
>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.
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#24It'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.
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].
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#25I 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.…
>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.
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.)
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#26I 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.…
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.
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
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…
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.
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
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…
I believe the reason is because they plan to roll out localised versions to different countries.
Although they surely won't roll out special versions to each national app store, so you do have a point there…
I'm not sure why they did it, but it's their prerogative.
Ferner, I don't think you should forget that there is still a lot of web content which is restricted by country — YouTube being a much-despised example of that, although they have obvious reasons there; BBC iPlayer being another example with similar (but far more justifiable) reasons. From those examples, I think one can guess that one of the issues may be copyright: It's easier for them to handle the copyright of just the US.
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#30It'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.
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 ;-)